A life of service

Centenarian Geoff Roberts sits in his Ōrewa home and reminisces with his wife, Joan, about a lifetime’s calling that took them as Christian missionaries to Japan and Taiwan before decades of “retirement”, serving at ministries across New Zealand.

After spending about 18 months in the army, Auckland-born Geoff joined the air force in 1945, determined to be a pilot. The dream was not to be, however, since the war was winding down and the air force was reluctant to train new pilots. Instead, he was consigned amid a spell of harsh weather to help out with crop harvesting in South Canterbury.

After the war, Geoff studied and later worked as a teacher in Wellsford, and then went to Bible College, preparing for what he thought would be missionary service in Papua New Guinea.

While praying one day, he felt God direct his attention to Japan, a country that had not been in his thinking at all.

“I said, ‘If it’s to be Japan, You’ll have to give me love for the Japanese’ – and He did. In fact, I fitted into Japan like a hand into a glove.”

Geoff spent 19 years in Japan with WEC International, an organisation pioneered by C.T. Studd, an English cricketing great in the late 19th century who became a missionary in China, India and Africa.

Almost six years after Geoff landed in Japan in 1952, a young woman from New Zealand arrived.

Geoff knew Joan Halliwell well: While teaching in Wellsford years earlier, he had lived with her parents in Port Albert. Joan, the youngest of eight children, boarded in town during the week, while Geoff stayed at her parents’ home.

“It was very quiet during the week, but when the eighth child came home on the weekend, it was anything but quiet!” he recalls. “We were like brother and sister, arguing over everything.

“I was a staunch bachelor and was determined I was going to be a missionary and wasn’t going to be derailed by romance. However, God had other ideas.” 

After two years of language study – and courtship spent “visiting every mountain and garden in Kyoto” – Geoff and Joan were married in nearby Yokaichi.

They had four children, three of them “made in Japan” and one in NZ. They also have eight grandchildren, mostly living abroad.

Looking back, Geoff says, it was by God’s grace that he never got to fly warplanes in the Pacific. If he had fought against the Japanese it may have been difficult decades later to serve as a missionary in their country.

In the military, he recalls, “we were taught to hate those guys”, a sentiment that was still prevalent in NZ when he paid his first visit home after 11 years. He recalls being interviewed by a reporter who wanted to put words in his mouth about the Japanese people – things that he neither believed nor felt.

Geoff and Joan became fluent in Japanese, which helped them win acceptance in a society wary of foreigners. Joan laughingly remembers some of her Japanese English students telling her later that they had thought they’d never relate to her, because they had dark eyes and hers were hazel.

Geoff says he had to adjust his expectations of seeing hundreds of Japanese embrace Christianity. An evangelist later assured him that if there was  one soul saved in any campaign, that was a success.

In Japan, the Roberts children were homeschooled, using the NZ curriculum. In 1971, the family moved to Taiwan, and they enrolled at an international school, where Joan taught.

Returning home after seven years in Taiwan, Geoff served as chaplain at Massey University and Palmerston North Teachers’ College, then directed the Auckland-based NZ Evangelical Missionary Alliance before serving as interim pastor at churches in Auckland and Wellington.

They moved to Ōrewa in 2001 and, still not ready to rest, held various leadership roles at Ōrewa Baptist Church.

After a bad fall in 2022, Geoff spent a year in Northhaven, but he pushed to be allowed to return to Joan, and was eventually able to do so last May. Six months later, he celebrated his 100th birthday at home.

On a table in their lounge sits a copy of a memoir he was persuaded to write – “even if only for the kids” – entitled The Life of a Missionary.

The book bears a subheading that seems to sum up Geoff and Joan’s lives – an excerpt of a poem by C.T. Studd: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.”