By Andre Viljoen, Gateway News.
“I want to introduce you to my wife,” said a man in Sri Lanka to Cassie Carstens, the South African visionary of a global family-training-and-mentoring movement called “The World Needs a Father” (TWANF).
“When I went through your training I was divorced from her. And then, through your training I discovered that I had never really loved her as Jesus wanted me to love her. So I went back to her and we restarted the matter.
“We got married again. And it’s now two years later and we have Heaven at home,” he said.
Defining moments
Cassie said two defining moments in his life played key roles in birthing the movement that is now radically transforming families in 120 countries including about 14 in Africa. While training leaders in a refugee camp in Tanzinia in 2002 he heard testimonies of extreme violence and trauma that “broke my soul into pieces” and convinced him that fatherlessness is the greatest problem in the world and the greatest pain in God’s heart. The second formative moment happened in 2005, when Abongile, a 15-year-old orphan girl (now his adopted daughter) who his wife had persuaded him to allow to stay in their house, unexpectedly called him “my daddy”. He said her words “messed me up” and drove him to undertake an in-depth Bible study where he discovered principles that became the four pillars of TWNAF’s fatherhood training – affirmation, identity formation, affection and attention.
Cassie said that 24 years since his soul-shattering experience in Tanzania and 15 years since the founding of TWANF, he is more convinced than ever that “fatherlessness is not a problem: it is the problem.” Fatherlessness fuels every major social evil, he said.
He said from the beginning it was apparent that the most practical way to address the problem of fatherlessness globally was to establish a decentralised movement which is owned by everybody who does training. Fortunately, he had experience of leading an international sports ministry movement which was in 160 nations at the time – and now is in 240 nations. Another key to TWANF’s success was adopting a model of training people to train other people to carry out fatherhood training, he said. Today TWANF offers extensive training resources that can be downloaded online and Cassie’s book The World Needs a Father has been translated into 25 languages.