(RNS) — John Mehl, a teaching pastor at Colorado’s Timberline Church, and Miguel Flores Robles, the drummer in the worship band at Timberline’s Windsor campus, get along well, even though they don’t understand each other’s language. Nor is Flores, who is only fluent in Spanish, able to communicate directly with the leader of the worship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s sermons, which are in English.
The answer to this riddle is artificial-intelligence real-time translation, a technology that has yet to become widespread in houses of worship but is already providing a way for congregations to welcome members who don’t speak their language.
Because he wanted Flores and other non-English speakers in the congregation to be able to better understand the service, Mehl went looking for a translation solution about a year ago when he stumbled upon Wordly, an AI start-up founded in 2017 that catered mostly to people who run conferences at their first product launch in 2019.
He hoped Wordly would build bridges for the small group of non-English speakers, mostly Spanish speakers, among the 500 congregants who attend three weekend services at Timberline’s Windsor campus, a smaller offshoot of the thousands who attend the non-denominational church’s Fort Collins campus.
A quick Google search led him to Wordly. “ From the very beginning, we’ve always been a solution focused on how do we make it really easy and inexpensive or affordable for organizations of any size to be able to bring live translation to their meetings and events,” said Dave Deasy, Wordly’s chief marketing executive. The company’s clients now include about 200 U.S. houses of worship, mostly churches but also a few synagogues and mosques, which pay per minute of translation that includes some 60 different languages.
It has transformed how non-English speakers relate to Timberline. Flores said he enters a code on his cellphone to listen to the sermon in Spanish through his headphones in real time. “It was the reason I feel more at ease in this place, because I can understand the preaching,” he said. “It’s helped me a lot to stay more informed, more confident.” It has made him feel comfortable inviting other Spanish speakers to join him at the church, he said.
Mehl has also facilitated a “reverse Wordly experience,” inviting a church member who speaks Spanish to deliver about eight minutes of a sermon in Spanish and asking English speakers in the pews to use Wordly to understand.
“ When language starts to be bridged, then all of a sudden, so many other ways to care for one another and recognize one another within a community, even though there are diversities, is a lot easier and a lot healthier,” said Mehl. Those relationships across language barriers spill out “into all areas of the community,” which Mehl sees as “Kingdom wins.”
AI translation for religious services is a new phenomenon, and Christian experts in AI ethics and multicultural ministry are just beginning to parse through their guidance for churches. Some had not heard of live AI translation in worship services before being contacted by RNS.
Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, a multicultural ministry expert and Oceanian womanist theologian who previously worked with the World Council of Churches, cautioned that, within current practices globally, multicultural churches often coalesce around a common tongue, even if some members are less comfortable in the dominant language.
Kutter Callaway, associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is among the faculty spearheading the seminary’s guidance on AI, said that Christianity in particular is “incarnational,” leading to an emphasis on a human’s spoken words. The theologian explained, “Our bodies in space and time matter. And so when you worship, there is something about being connected to the other human bodies in the room.”
While he could imagine bringing in AI translation for the occasional larger event or for educational meetings, Callaway said, “ I do wonder if there is still something about worshipping together with people who are speaking the same language as you. I’m not sure how much AI or translation services like this would break people out of that silo.”
