About
About this website
I started this website in 2009 as a place to gather the various things I had learned from the Bible, as well as reworked study resources and sermon notes which I had gathered over time. It is easy to be caught up in the fervour of a good Bible teaching, but one runs a real risk of losing the significance which that sermon had for you in the long run if you do not return to the notes and the passage. So I decided to rework and gather some of those notes to a single place. The decision to have such a repository on-line was that other people might come across it and find encouragement and inspiration in what I had learned.About the name
In 1996—when I was still a pre-teen—I was invited by a friend to attend a coffee bar which was held every Friday evening at the local church for children and Saturday evenings older youths and young adults. This coffee bar was named "Café on the Rock". During the years in which I was part of this initiative, I met good people who teachings were invaluable and was grown tremendously in my faith. Around 2000, Café on the Rock was closed. The idea was to go back to the drawing board and rethink priorities, missions and think about a general revitalisation. Shortly after this, in-fighting within the church concerned caused the youth ministry to collapse, among other things. What followed was a series of lies and cover-ups so that to this day, long time members of the congregation still do not fully know what happened. I left the church a couple of years later while still attending confirmation classes and have never returned. I do not know if that church has since restarted the tradition of having a coffee bar, but the last time I was there, the mural still had the name "Café on the Rock" painted on it. This website has no affiliation to any institution, whether it be an organised church body, a coffee bar or anything else. I chose this name (and the tag-line) because it has great sentimental value for me. The good people I met in that church I effectively met through the coffee bar. The spirit and devotion with which most of the various youth workers (who were associated with that coffee bar over the years) worked within that ministry was an inspiration and I am thankful to have had such faithful teachers.About myself
I was raised in a home of reformed (of Calvinist stock) Christians. From an early age my parents took me to church and I enjoyed going with them. For the first part of my life I lived a very sheltered life in a small town in the country. After moving to the city, I attended the local church within the same denomination of the one I grew up in. That is where I found the Café on the Rock coffee bar. Early in high school, in-fighting within that church caused the collapse of the youth ministry there, much to my distress. I however kept growing in faith through group Bible studies and an initiative at my school. It was at this time in my life when I was introduced to Messianic Judaism. A couple of other incidents, however, led to a breakdown of my faith in organised religion as I started university and a passive era of my spiritual life was inaugurated. I however kept reading the Bible and, eventually, only praying. Five years on I realised that it was time for me to stop feeling sorry for myself and start attending church again: not having fellowship with believers had drained me almost completely. I knew of a church a cousin of mine attended and I cautiously and suspiciously approached on of its morning services. I received a warm welcome from members of the congregation, but it was the theology that won me over. Today I can proudly say that I am part of a Bible teaching, and loving and caring church family. I have lived in the South Africa all my life (the bulk spent in the Western Cape), and I love this country. At present I am studying for my masters in computer science at the University of Stellenbosch.Licensing & Copyright
Copyright of all original work on this website
All text on this website has been licensed under a Creative Commons license listed below:
Café on the Rock by Wessel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License.
Copyrights of Biblical texts used on this website
Scripture quotations marked with the following abbreviations are from the respective translations of the Bible:- ESV: English Standard Version, owned by Crossway Bibles
- KJV: The Authorized King James Version, of which the copyright has expired outside of the United Kingdom
- NIV: New International Version, owned by Zondervan
- WEB: World English Bible, which has been released into the public domain
