A typical small church situation
A Baptist chapel in a market town. A Methodist church in a village outside Belfast. A house church in Galway. Forty to eighty people on a Sunday, an amplifier with two microphones, and a volunteer who does the slides. A Polish couple has been coming for a year; a Ukrainian mother and her son joined in the spring. They are part of the church family, but the sermon passes them by.
In a small church everybody notices. The pastor wants to include them, but booking an interpreter every week is out of the question, and there is nobody in the church who speaks Ukrainian.
What you actually need
- A device to broadcast from: a laptop or a smartphone with a browser. An older laptop is fine.
- Sound: best is a cable from your amplifier or mixer into the laptop (a small USB audio interface makes this easy). If you have no such output, a phone placed close to the preacher works as a start.
- Internet: a stable connection in the building. If your church has no Wi-Fi, a mobile hotspot can work; test it first.
- A QR code: printed on a card at the door or shown on the screen.
That is all. No receivers, no headsets to hand out and collect, no booth.
How a Sunday goes in a small church
The volunteer arrives ten minutes early, opens the broadcast studio on the laptop and checks the input level meter while the pastor tests the microphone. If the level is low, there is a boost setting. The QR code is already on the welcome slide.
The Polish couple and the Ukrainian family scan the code, pick their language and put in an earbud. The volunteer presses start. During the service, the volunteer can press pause during long musical sections if they like, and stop at the end. Afterwards the church can look back at the text transcript and correct a name that came out wrong.
If your only volunteer is away, someone else can be invited to the church account, so the translation does not depend on one person.
Keeping costs within a small budget
The Lite plan costs €65 a month and includes 480 credits, enough for four two-hour services translated into one language. Because a language only uses credits while someone is listening, you pay nothing for the Sundays your newcomers are away. A church that needs two languages, as in the example above, fits within Duo (€100 a month, 960 credits) for services of up to two hours.
For churches that only need translation now and then, an extra credit pack (300 credits for €50) never expires and can last months. The cost guide has more examples.
Honest limits
Live AI translation is good enough to follow a sermon, prayers and notices. It is not flawless: Bible names and church terms are the hardest part, and a poor microphone signal makes everything worse. In a small church you can talk to your listeners directly and ask how it is going, which is a real advantage.
For moments that are personal, such as a pastoral conversation with a newcomer, a baptism interview or a funeral, a person who speaks the language is still the better choice. Translation software helps people follow the service; the friendship around it is still up to the church.