June 18

Preaching From A Boat

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables. . .

Matthew 13:1-3   

A boat is not typically thought of as a likely base of evangelism. It was for Jesus because he had to escape from the crowds. For others, though, it has been a base for evangelism in order to reach the crowds. This was true of Ethel Groce and several other “boat ladies,” who evangelized among China’s boat people during the decades before China was closed to missionaries in the early 1950s.

Ethel grew up in Missouri and studied at Moody Bible Institute. She took nurses’ training before going abroad to work with the Oriental Boat Mission, a small mission agency started by an Englishwoman, Miss Alexander, who had been burdened for the boat people in the Hong Kong harbor. Missionaries had previously tried to minister to the boat people by living on land and going out to preach to them, but the boat people did not identify with them. Miss Alexander and her “boat ladies” vowed to live on the boats and become one with the people.

For a time there were nine boats from which these women ministered to boat people in the Hong Kong harbor and other harbors. Sometimes the people were hostile, but often they were interested, as Ethel discovered when she initiated cooking classes and schooling for the children.

“Little by little, the boat ladies began attracting more followers, and over the years they worked out a regular routine of ports of call. It was a lonely life, for months would often go by in which they did not see another person who spoke English. They seldom heard from their relatives in the States, for they were able to get back to the points where they could receive mail only at rare intervals. Yet they had so much work to do that they did not mind. At one point, one of the boat ladies established a leper colony aboard her craft. It survived there for two years and later moved ashore.”

By 1949, Ethel realized that she could no longer continue her work along the China coast. “The Communists were taking over everywhere; all the Christians were fleeing.” She moved her boat to Hong Kong, where she continued her evangelistic outreach.

She established another clinic and set up a school for approximately eighty children. She worked with Chinese volunteers in a visitation program and conducted church services on Sunday with the assistance of a Chinese pastor all of this work on board a boat, which became her boating home. ¹⁸