[By Jonathan Downie]
Recently, I had the privilege of leading a webinar on the mechanics of multilingual church. We covered doing nothing, having services in different languages, having different languages in the same service and the oddly complex world of church interpreting.
But in preparing that webinar and definitely in delivering it, one thing struck me. Most people I talk to think that the mechanics of church interpreting are the hard bit. Finding interpreters, setting up technology, wiring, training and preparing seem to be the bits that scare people off. But the mechanics of setting up interpreting are usually the easiest bit to teach (apart from selecting interpreters, we’ll come to that later).
Give me an hour with church leaders and their vision and I can explain to them the options their church has and how the make them work. It doesn’t actually take that long to purchase some reasonable laptops, wire them up, and setup an interpreting platform. It takes no time at all to hand an interpreter a microphone.
That’s the easy bit.
So what is the hard bit of church interpreting?
The bit that makes church interpreting hard isn’t the physical setup but the settling in. It takes time and leadership and vision and determination to make interpreting and languages as a whole part of the identity and vision of a church. It takes time and leadership and vision and determination to integrate multilingualism into everything a church does. And it takes leadership and time and determination to deal with the inevitable disputes that arise in truly multilingual and multicultural churches.
This is where church interpreting gets hard. Sending notes and song lists to interpreters is just a habit. Ensuring that the equipment works is a tick list, not a challenge. Buying the right cables and having a laptop per language is a cost item, not a leadership issue.
Where should interpreting churches concentrate?
This means that church leaders should always think vision and strategy first and mechanics later. Your vision and priorities will determine the mechanics. They will also determine whether the mechanics will even work.
Start with the vision of your church and where you want it to do. Think about leadership and listening and the technicalities will be much easier to solve. Keep an attentive eye and ear on what is really going on and solutions to physical problems can be found much more easily.
Vision and strategy should always come before mechanics. They are the hard bit.