One of the issues we face in multilingual church settings is how we include those who do not speak the majority language most fully in the service whilst also allowing for intelligibility. The issue is particularly stark when we read 1 Corinthians 14. Whatever else you might think Paul is speaking about there, he is clearly concerned with intelligibility. That is, speaking in tongues is not very helpful if nobody understands what on earth you’re saying. He is, therefore, quite clear on the need for translation or just not doing that so everybody can understand.

Paul’s reasons for that are straightforward enough. In v5, he points out what we are doing in the public gathering is ‘so that the church may be built up’. In v6, he talks about the need for others to benefit from what we are doing. We aren’t there just to please ourselves or focus on our personal worship, but to build up the body. In vv8-12, he centres on intelligibility and insists unless people know and understand what is being said, they are not being built up. If the public gathering is for the purpose of corporately building the body, we should set aside anything that may be beneficial to us individually (as we judge it) in favour of those things that will build up the church corporately. The whole passage focuses on the corporate nature of the gathering, that we are to focus on doing what is corporately beneficial and how intelligibility and understanding is vital for anyone else to be built up i.e. if they don’t understand us – even if we think whatever we’re saying is beneficial to us – it isn’t beneficial to them and therefore isn’t building them up and to continue doing it undercuts the very reason why we are there at all.

In a multilingual setting, this has implications for us. Take your teaching, for example. If people don’t understand the language you are speaking, you haven’t really built them up in any way and the Word won’t really do them any good. The obvious solution to this is to translate your sermons. That way, everybody in the room can be built up. That is all well and good but what do you do when people who don’t speak your language come to your church, there is nowhere else you can send them, and you simply don’t have anybody to translate for them? Are we disobeying Paul’s instructions here if we simply say that we don’t have the means to translate and we trust they will be built up in other ways by being amongst God’s people?

Similar questions come up concerning the songs we sing. Are we ignoring what Paul says here if we sing English songs that half the room don’t fully understand (or understand at all)? Do we err if we all decide to sing a song in Farsi for the sake of our Farsi-speaking brethren, accepting that we English speakers may not fully understand what we are singing? Have we failed to obey Paul when we do that? If we have, what is the solution when there is no Farsi-speaking congregation to point people to and we have other biblical objections to the homogenous unit principle at any rate (see here, here, and here for why)?

The problems run right the way through the service. What do we tell people when we pray? If we simply pray from the front, have we failed in our duty to build up the church by praying solely in English knowing that some don’t properly understand? What if we have open prayer and we let people pray in their own language knowing that a good section of the church won’t understand them? Are we just riding roughshod over what Paul is clearly asking us to centre on in 1 Corinthians 14?

Whatever you do might be grounds for someone to suggest you are failing to properly uphold some biblical imperative or other. We inevitably have to take apparently conflicting instructions, work out if there is a way to synthesise them and, if there isn’t, determine which takes precedence and must give way to our sub-optimal fallen setup this side of glory. For example, is it best to send people away to unilingual, monocultural churches because they won’t fully understand everything going on (assuming such a place even exists) or to welcome them knowing they won’t understand everything that goes on? If we welcome them, is it best to allow parts of what we do forever remain unintelligible to only one section of the church or is it better to make all sections of the church suffer some unintelligibility for the sake of building up others at least some of the time? If we do translate, how far are we helping non-English speakers (in a majority English-speaking context) acclimatise to the need to operate in a society that won’t translate for them? Do we favour immediate intelligibility in the first language of the hearer or serving the long term good of encouraging understanding in English?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there are any easy answers here. Specifically because there are no easy answers, I think we have to be careful in our pronouncements about ‘the right way’. I recognise Paul has a real and clear call to favour intelligibility but we can’t overlook the other clear call to welcome the foreigner and stranger and those instructions don’t come with the caveat of, only if they fully understand everything you say. We can’t overlook the need to build up which requires understanding but we equally can’t overlook the gospel imperative to represent the manifold wisdom of God in saving both Jew and Gentile, male and female, people from every tribe, tongue and nation with all their ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity.

Which brings me to the specific way we work out these questions in our church. With our sermons, we are able to translate in our context. So, in a sense, no problem here. We recognise what gets translated may not be as good as hearing the message directly. We recognise there are deficiencies in that translation. But we acknowledge the power of the Holy Spirit and we make the effort to make the preaching as clear and understandable to everyone as we can.

The question of what we sing and how we pray is a little different. When we sing, we typically sing in English. However, we have sung in Farsi. We use slides that have Farsi script and transliterated Farsi so we can all sing together. Sometimes, we sing well known hymns that have been translated into Farsi. When we do this, people can look up the English hymn words so they know what they are singing making it intelligible (it is tantamount to Paul’s instruction to have an interpreter). If we aren’t doing this, we ask someone to give us a general overview of the song so that we have some idea of what we are singing. It isn’t word-for-word, but a paraphrase which allows us to broadly understand. Sometimes, we simply don’t have that available. Given the majority of the service is in English, we simply accept that we will sing something in Farsi – that we unilingual English speakers may not understand – as a concession to the significant section of the church who do understand.

One might argue this last position is riding roughshod over what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14. I am not convinced it does fall foul of Paul’s concerns because his main issues seems to be individualism. The Corinthians were having the Lord’s Supper on their own, they were serving their own needs, ignoring the wider needs of the body. His comments on intelligibility (I think) are best read in that context. Specifically, his concern is the person claiming they are speaking in tongues, that nobody else can understand, and this is a vital part of their worship to God. But Paul is pushing against that individualistic concern and arguing that what matters most in the church gathering is what builds the body and serves people corporately. In the particular case, the individual speaking in tongues is serving only themselves and nobody else when they should be thinking more about what serves the wider body.

I take it, then, that it would not be helpful to sing a song in, say, Norwegian for the sole member of the congregation from Norway, particularly if they can understand English, because that serves only an individual and nobody corporately. But in our context, singing a Farsi song here and there it is building up a significant section of the church corporately. It is a good example of the majority setting aside their needs in order to serve and build up a large minority. I think Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 would leave room for this as an act of service by the majority, preferring others needs above their own and still well within the bounds of seeking to build up the body corporately. The same goes, I think, for our corporate prayer. If prayer in our particular language will build up a significant section of the church, I think that is a legitimate means of corporately building the body. If our prayer in our particular language will only serve me, because nobody else there will understand it, then I think we should not be praying in that language in the corporate gathering.

I must admit, I have been guilty of the slightly sloppy form of words: if you would like to pray in your own language, feel free. I don’t think – based on what I have said above – that is quite right or legitimate. I see no difference between someone praying in Igbo as the only Nigerian in the room from that region and the Corinthian praying in tongues solely for their own benefit. Going forward, I would prefer a form of words akin to: if you know there are others here who speak your language, then please feel free to pray in your mother tongue. I think this small but significant change of wording emphasises that we are there to corporately build the body, that there are people in our midst who will be built up by our prayer. It allows the room to set aside their needs in the pursuit of genuinely building up others without succumbing to the total individualism of this serves me and the corporate gathering is solely about me, my relationship with God and what serves my personal worship experience.

I want to stress again, there are no easy answers here. You may read 1 Corinthians 14 and land differently to me. I don’t presume to say this is the only reading of those verses. In fact, if you want a slightly different but well reasoned alternative case, you can do worse than read Phil Whittal here. But what you have here is how I cut it and I would argue this approach helps us account for and synthesise the gospel imperative to welcome others, to manifest the manifold wisdom of God in our churches, to make proceedings intelligible, to avoid individualism in corporate worship and to centre on what builds the body.