“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.
Cassie said that modern research in fields such as neuroscience, psychology and other disciplines confirm that the principles of fatherhood that he found in Scripture align with what researchers are discovering about human developmental needs. TWANF has developed fatherhood training material for both Christian and secular environments. By God’s grace, he said, their training and mentoring is valued by governments in various nations including countries which are closed to the Gospel.
Pre-evangelism
He said he believes that their training is “brilliant for pre-evangelism”. If he had a message for pastors, he said it would be that we don’t do evangelism like Jesus, who did not just start out to convert people. “There’s a prelude to what Jesus did and we leave out the prelude. We don’t create the appetite; we don’t say: ‘I brought you abundant life.’ So I think what we’re doing [through fatherhood training] is creating an appetite for the Gospel.”
At 71 Cassie is not about to stop pursuing his lifelong passion to see God’s Kingdom bringing transformation into all areas of life. He is currently working on a new book, Boy Soul to Man Soul, about growth through all life stages into masculine maturity.
Testimonies of transformation
One of the joys of his work with TWANF is the many testimonies of transformation. “We’ve got numerous stories of guys that said: ’We were actually already talking to the lawyers about divorce and we stopped it. Our marriage is completely restored to a level that we call Heaven with confidence.”
In a country “in the East” he said he sat in a dining room with a father who had invited his neighbours to hear his 14-year-old son’s testimony. In front of about 25 people he asked his son to speak about how his fatherhood training had affected him. The boy said that before his father did the training he used to call his mother before coming home to ask whether his father was there. If he was there he would stay away as long as possible, coming home after dark, because he didn’t want to be in the same space as his father. But since his father had done the training, he said he still called home and if his mother said his father was there he would rush home as soon as possible “to be with dad”. Later the whole family and the neighbours all became “followers of the Truth”.
Cassie also shared a story that took place the previous week, involving a local politician who said that if the training was true then he had never loved his wife and owed her an apology. Cassie challenged him to do that. The man said his wife was in hospital and he was about to visit her and there would be other people around as it was visiting hour. Cassie said he should aplogise on his knees. Half an hour later the politician called him and said, to his wife’s amazement, he had done it.
“When people follow through on what we encourage them to do, they all have an enormous amount of benefit from it. If they don’t follow through, we can’t do it.”
For more information about The World Needs a Father visit their website at https://twnaf.com
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