Floyd's Legacy in My Life

Floyd McClung preaching on Dam Square, Amsterdam early 1980s.

One of my heroes has just died, his name was Floyd McClung. Here’s what I wrote about him and Sally back in 2009 in the introduction to my first book on movements.

Let me tell you why movements matter to me. I walked away from my faith in my late teens and early twenties. It didn’t take long for my life to unravel. I wasn’t happy with God, and I wasn’t happy without him. I didn’t think living as a Christian was possible. Then along came an Australian guy named Bill Hallam. He’d come to know Christ on the hippie trail between Amsterdam and Delhi through a ministry called Dilaram, founded by Floyd and Sally McClung.

I was impressed with Bill. There were times when I wanted to throw him out of my house because of the hard things he had to say, but I knew he loved me, and I knew that Christ had changed his life. I hoped my life could change too.

I gave up running from God. Six months later I’d saved enough money to travel from Australia to Holland and join Dilaram. It was the late 1970s. I ended up in Amsterdam on the Ark—Dilaram’s discipleship community, located on two large houseboats on a canal behind the central railway station.

There I learned how to experience the love of God in prayer and worship. I learned how to communicate the gospel to travelers from all over the world. I saw broken lives restored by the power of the Word and the Spirit in the context of a discipleship community.

There was Jean Claude, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion who had come to faith. I was there the day Interpol came to arrest him. I shared a room with two former members of the Irish Republican Army, both new Christians. One eventually turned himself in and went to prison. I remember Dave, a six-foot-five inch Scotsman and rage-aholic, waving a hammer in front of my face and threatening to kill me. There were people with backgrounds in homosexuality, prostitution, Eastern religions and drugs. Every year around forty of them came to faith and began the journey of discipleship.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Dilaram was a movement. It began when God called the McClungs. Floyd was in India with Youth With A Mission when he passed a beggar on the street and realized the beggar was a young Westerner who had fallen on hard times. There were thousands of hippies on the road from London to Delhi. Many were searching for truth but instead got dysentery and hepatitis and became addicted to drugs.

Floyd and Sally set up the first Dilaram House in Kabul, Afghanistan. They took in ill and drug-dependent hippies, nursed them, talked to them about Jesus and saw many come to know him. Soon Dilaram Houses were established in London, Amsterdam, Kathmandu and Delhi. Many of the workers for these houses had come to faith through Dilaram.

I never forgot the lessons I learned through my time with Dilaram: I discovered the love of God, the call to discipleship, the power of the gospel to change lives, the work of the Holy Spirit, the importance of prayer and Christian community, and God’s heart for the nations. These lessons became part of me and have guided me ever since. I also didn’t mind meeting Michelle in Amsterdam, the Australian girl I would eventually marry.

I was just one of so many lives changed through Floyd’s influence.

In their sixties, when many are planning retirement, Floyd and Sally relocated to Cape Town, South Africa to pursue disciple making movements throughout Africa and beyond. He never left Africa.