God’s Speed: There’s more to the AfterBeat café than meets the eye

There’s a comforting smell of freshly ground coffee as you walk through the glass doors of the AfterBeat Café in Veendam. It’s decorated with large red Chesterfield couches, long dinner tables and messages like ‘we love coffee and people’ on the walls. Quiet music by religious bands and other calm songs bring a nice atmosphere. 

AfterBeat © Amber van Kempen

At the back, in what used to be a storage space, is a room painted completely black with more colourful posters with “Welcome home” and “You are already loved” written on them and a large stage with about a hundred wooden chairs neatly lined up in front of it. Every Sunday, after free coffee for all, it fills with the sound of music and prayer.

All ages and types of people have joined this church, ranging from very young children to the elderly. During the service, the songs are all about letting Jesus and God into your life and allowing them to guide you. Everybody sings along and during the prayer, collective amens go around the room. Observing the crowd, I notice many people with their arms up, reaching towards the sky. Similarly, during prayer, they have their hands on their legs with palms up instead of clasped together. 

AfterBeat © Amber van Kempen

You don’t have to believe in Jesus and God yourself in order to see and feel that they do. When everyone sings along to the songs, I hear their faith, love and trust in God. These people, singing together loud and proud like a powerful choir, make goosebumps run up my spine and along my arms. I notice one woman in front of me on her knees, reaching arms towards the sky with her head bowed down. I’m far away, but it seems like she is crying, moved by the music and her faith. 

During the service, everyone listens intently, not a sound besides the speaker is heard. The pastor tells a story about his time in America, where he visited a community that increasingly became removed from neighbouring municipalities. Eventually, everyone left the town and the buildings deteriorated. The only thing that remained in good condition was the church. The priest uses this example to showcase the power of God and that, when everything else fails, He will still be there for you. 

The service is conducted by the pastor from the main church in Assen. These places are connected due to the fact that CLC Assen rents out this very back room for the services. This, however, did not happen randomly and certainly not within a short period of time. 

Lyrics on the screen © Amber van Kempen

The story behind the church café idea begins thirty years ago, when 17 year old Alko Stoel browses through the CD section in a music store. He finds a live recording of The World Wide Message Tribe, a Christian rap and pop band, spreading a positive message about religion. Listening to it at the dining table with his mother, he realises that this or something similar, is what he wants to do. “It wasn't organ music and slow,” Alko tells me, laughing. 

Coming from a strict Christian family, teenager Alko never really feels a deep personal connection to God because of the strictness and feeling of obligation. Being a rebellious teen, he does not want to follow rules, he wants to live life in the way he sees fit and disagrees with the implication of rules surrounding the personal relationship with God within Christianity. He doesn’t like how his fellow Christians treat the religion, calling them hypocrites, because they expect others to behave a certain way, but fall short themselves. 

“I don’t think that’s the way God intended for the religion to be practiced,” Alko says, the relationship with God is personal to him. “It’s between you and God, not between you and a set of rules.”  

In his mid-twenties, Alko organizes Sport&AfterBeat - a sport’s day followed by a concert with Christian rappers inspired by The World Wide Message Tribe. Up to 500 people come each time. He invites a band from the US and together they perform in schools, talking about mental health and faith. It’s not long before they have to book larger spaces and invite students to their performances during lunch breaks. 

Later, he books Transform DJ’s, an American punk band with a DJ. “I thought that was quite weird, you know, a band with a DJ, I thought ‘What is this?’ because it was really cool,” says Alko. They keep in touch and one day, during their European tour, he gets a message from one of the DJ’s. They’re in the Netherlands for a week and need a place to stay. If he can help them with that, they will help him with a concert. 

Light and sound control panel © Amber van Kempen

They end up visiting high schools, teaching music classes and sharing their religion. It’s then that Alko realises he has found the formula to inspire youth and show that religion does not have to be boring. He becomes their tour manager and together they travel the world, including Scotland where Alko meets someone connected to The World Wide Message Tribe. In a full circle moment it turns out that the organisation that inspired teenage Alko is itself inspired by the adult Alko and what he’s doing in Dutch high-schools and they want his help. 

“It was like being home,” he says, “it felt like a calling, I had to find out if this was God talking to me.”

“How did you convince your wife?” I ask. 

“Oh she was on board before I even said anything. It turned out that we had been walking around with the same idea in our head for a while but weren’t voicing it. Whenever I came back from Scotland she noticed that I was a lot happier after those trips, that there was something there, that was making me happy.”  

It took a while, but once him and his wife Miriam had saved enough money, they move there, visiting high schools across Britain with The Message, spreading the word. But it’s in Scotland, where Alko visits a church in a mall and gets the idea for AfterBeat back in Veendam. He learns how to preach from an American pastor he meets while being stuck in Scotland due to the pandemic. 

But, starting the café part of AfterBeat in Veendam, Alko became so busy he had no time nor the energy to also run a church. “So, we kind of let the idea go. We had a good run in Scotland and we are very happy we did it,” he says.

Three days after having put aside the idea of running a church at the back of a café, Alko tells me that he got a very interesting phone call.

“Who was it?,” I ask

“It was City Life Church! The church we go to in Assen, they’re connected to HillSong in America, and we love Hillsong,” Alko says excitedly. “Anyway, they wanted to rent out AfterBeat and start a church in the room we rent out for events. We kind of lost our footing, like what is this? Of course we agreed, and that is kind of how it started,” he tells me proudly.

Banner from City Life Church © Amber van Kempen