Gene Wilfred Spear was born on Aug. 14, 1927, to Maurice B. and Edna Carls Spear. He was born at home on their dairy farm in Berryton, Kan., near Topeka. He grew up learning to work hard with his sister and three brothers as they helped their parents survive the Great Depression. He and his siblings attended a two-room schoolhouse a mile and a half from the farm, riding a horse to school every day. They rose early to milk and feed the dairy cows before school and came right home after school to do it all over again.

Daily family worship and weekly attendance at the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Topeka nourished Gene’s soul and taught him the Christian faith from a young age. He graduated from Berryton High School and enlisted in the US Navy in 1945. He was trained in aviation electronics and deployed to Panama because World War II had just ended. He joined a Navigators Bible study and drove every weekend to a Baptist church on the other end of the Panama Canal. He also began to sense a call to the ministry, especially to people in countries like Panama where Bibles and churches were not as plentiful as in America. Later in life he would write of these formative years, “God took this farm boy off to a foreign country where he could see many people who had a great need of the salvation of Jesus Christ.”

After his honorable discharge from the Navy, he enrolled in Sterling College in Kansas and began attending Sterling, Kan., RPC. He became much more familiar with Reformed theology through the preaching of Dr. Lester Kilpatrick and, in 1951, received his bachelor of arts with an emphasis in Greek language. Sterling College was where he met Ruth Adams. They were married on Aug. 16, 1951, and were an inseparable team for the next 69 ½ years. He graduated from the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary (RPTS) in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1954 and then earned a master of theology degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pa.

During his seminary years, he visited with Sam Boyle, also a member of the Topeka Reformed Presbyterian Church, who had been forced to abandon mission work in China and had begun evangelistic outreach in Japan. In 1955, Gene and Ruth applied and were called by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Reformed Presbyterian Church to evangelize and plant churches in Japan.

They packed their things and drove to Seattle, where they sailed for Kobe, Japan, weathering a typhoon, with their two small children seasick most of the time. While many missionaries thought the Japanese language was too difficult to learn and conducted their ministries through translators, Gene and Ruth enrolled in language school, and Gene was able to preach in Japanese after a few years of study. While he preached in Japanese, he found that unbelievers were drawn to weekday classes with 30 minutes of English language instruction and 30 minutes of Bible teaching. Many came to know Christ through this initial contact.

He organized worship services at the Covenanter Book Store in Kobe, where God blessed his ministry with conversions. Eventually the church outgrew the bookstore in Kobe. God provided a house in Okamoto just east of Kobe where they moved and planted the Okamoto Keiyaku (Covenant) Church. As their family grew to five children, the Spears lovingly involved each of their children in church work. The mission provided a shared car, so when other missionaries had the car Gene rode a motorcycle to visit church members and run errands, often with a child on the back.

Eventually the Okamoto Keiyaku church called Rev. Shigeru Takiura to be their pastor, and the Spears moved further east to Mukonoso, where they began planting a second church in their home. Relationships were very important to Gene, and he spent thousands of hours writing letters, calling people on the phone, and, with his wife, hosting them in his home. The Mukonoso Church called Rev. Hiroyuki Kanamori as pastor, and the Spears returned to Kansas in 2001 after having served the Lord and the Japanese people for 46 years.

Gene was elected moderator of the Synod of the RPCNA in 1980. Geneva College awarded him a doctor of divinity degree. He and his wife, Ruth, were honored with the Distinguished Service Awards from Sterling College in 2005, and he was honored with the Faithful Servant Award from RPTS in 2012. He served on the board of Reformation Translation Fellowship for many years, and his book What Am I? has been published in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, and Urdu.

After returning from Japan, the Spears took care of Gene’s mother until her passing in 2004 at the age of 104. They then moved to Olathe, Kan., where Gene’s deep concern for his country kept him busy, advocating for the protection of the unborn and biblical morality. He continued to write letters in Japanese to a long list of people twice a year for many years during his retirement. His great and lasting affection for his wife, Ruth, touched many in a way that will endure for generations to come. With Ruth by his side, he passed from this life to his reward on Feb. 26, 2021, at the age of 93.

Ruth Adams Spear was born Apr. 2, 1928, the youngest child of Richard and Mary Belle Edgar Adams, at the Cache Creek Reformed Presbyterian Mission in Apache, Okla. Her playmates were Native American children with whom she worshiped each week under her father’s preaching. She had four older siblings who loved her and took care of her.

In 1942, when Ruth was 14, her father was called to pastor the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Beulah, Neb., where she eventually graduated from high school. She then went on to earn a BS degree in mathematics at Sterling College, graduating as salutatorian in 1950.

She married Gene Spear in a gown of white embroidered silk from China on Aug. 16, 1951. Gene went on to seminary, and Ruth helped pay for their room and board by assisting overnight in a school for the deaf and, after the birth of their first child, working as a live-in cook. She did not seek a lucrative career, although many would have been available to a young woman with such mathematical ability. In fact, she was paid a salary for only one year of her life, when she was a schoolteacher in Bloom, Kan.

Her parents had been missionaries in China before they came to Oklahoma, and her heart’s desire from childhood had been to take the good news about Jesus to other lands. This desire was fulfilled in 1955 when she and Gene sailed with their family to Kobe, Japan. She learned to speak Japanese fluently and sometimes on the phone was even mistaken for a Japanese person. She nurtured her children, while hosting Bible classes and church in her home and providing countless guests and friends with meals, refreshments, and gifts of homemade cookies.

For many years, her family cleared two rooms, lined up chairs, and had church in their home each Sabbath morning. She taught Sabbath school and vacation Bible school, and was a valuable member of the Psalm Committee, searching for tunes that fit the words of each psalm for the Japanese Psalter. Twice a year, they would have parties for each of the English Bible classes, with refreshments and games in their home.

Ruth’s purpose in life was to help Gene serve Christ. Together they showed the love of Christ and found different ways to interact with people, sharing the gospel and modeling Christian love to everyone they met. Any foreign visitors who did not know Japanese would be handed a psalter in which Ruth had typed or written the Japanese words phonetically so they could sing along in Japanese.

Every summer, setting aside her own comforts, she spent a month in a fishing village, without a refrigerator or washer and dryer, so Gene could get away from his work and the family could enjoy swimming and fishing. Gene always loved to fish and carried a collapsible fishing pole in his luggage wherever he went. Blocks of ice were delivered every three days for the icebox, and the family washed clothes outside in tubs, happy to get a suntan.

Gene and Ruth made sure their children received an excellent education, whether it was homeschooling, Japanese public school, or the Canadian Academy, followed by Geneva College. Ruth helped her children with Japanese kindergarten, which was their first total immersion in Japanese culture. She read notes from the teachers and helped them behave and stop pretending they did not understand Japanese. After her children were mostly grown, she branched out and was able to spend more time loving and enjoying Japanese culture and crafts while serving alongside her husband. She learned to do oshie, shippouyaki, and harie, and even took flower arrangement lessons.

She passed into eternal life on Sept. 20, 2021, at Forest Creek Memory Care in Overland Park, Kan., at the age of 93.

The Spears are survived by their children: Carol and her husband Christopher Wright, Bruce and his wife Susan, Mary Jane and her husband Harry Ward, Joyce and her husband Charles Schofield, and Bonnie and her husband David Weir. They are also survived by 15 grandchildren and over 35 great-grandchildren. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Ps. 116:15).