Several years ago, my team led the Congolese worship song Yezu Azali Awa at a live album recording in South Korea. No one in the worship team or the congregation was from the country, and no one spoke the language.
But the song’s simple refrain and uplifting melody was easy to grasp.
“Jesus is here with us,” we sang over and over again in Lingala and then later in Korean.
I didn’t choose this tune to make worshiping in another language feel novel or, worse, gimmicky. Instead, I wanted to sing it because of how the song communicates the nearness of God’s presence and our unswerving trust in his faithfulness.
Leading worship and singing in languages I am unfamiliar with is something I have practiced for over two decades. I have done so in a house church, at conferences held by seminaries and mission agencies, and in various cities around the world, like Seoul and Wau, South Sudan.
As a worship leader, I understand the complexity and vulnerability of effectively leading songs in a language you don’t know. Often, these worries arise: What if I mispronounce a word and bring dishonor? What if people think this is cultural appropriation? What if they just can’t engage in authentic worship?
Some people may also scoff at the idea of singing in a language that the majority at church don’t understand. It might not seem helpful or edifying to do this. Singing becomes harder when we don’t know the pronunciation of words, and we may feel tempted to zone out if we have no idea what we’re singing. We can wonder whether we’re really worshiping because we feel so distant from the songs.
But there are certain merits to worshiping in a language that we don’t comprehend.
Worship in a foreign language allows us to gain a glimpse of how every culture and every language illuminate and express God’s attributes in distinctive ways that we’ve never encountered or imagined.
When I first heard the soulful Arabic worship tune Anta ’Atheemun (“You Are So Awesome, O Lord”), I felt uncomfortable with singing “Allah” in its lyrics because of the word’s associations with Islam. But after learning that Arab Christians use this word to refer to God, I was struck by how God’s greatness and abundant grace have been praised for ages in a language and musical scale I was ignorant of.
Worship is not always about singing and experiencing music that we are comfortable with, agrees Jo-Ann Richards in a recent email conversation.
“If we love each other, we will create space in the corporate worship service for our brothers and sisters to express their worship to God in ways that they can relate to on a heart level,” wrote the founding director of CREW 40:4, a Jamaican nonprofit that creates culturally relevant expressions of worship.
Singing in a language you do not know also honors the breadth and depth of the church.
Global student exchanges, immigration, refugee influxes, and labor migration are making many Western congregations increasingly diverse. This presents an opportunity not only to worship alongside believers from other parts of the world but also to learn from their unique forms of cultural expressions in worship.
Over the years, people have approached me after worship services to thank me for singing in their mother tongues. I remember multiple instances of believers saying to me with tears in their eyes, “Thank you for singing in my language. I never expected to hear it used in worship here. I was deeply moved.”
The church, while existing locally, is a globally and historically connected community. Even if no one present speaks a particular language, singing it can provide an opportunity to emphasize the unity of the global church. We can venture out to sing in unfamiliar languages, with the option of providing translated lyrics in a common language.
When we do so, we build empathy and solidarity with believers in other parts of the world who are suffering. This is an embodied expression of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).
Some of the worship songs I lead at various events are in Karen, the language of a stateless people group in Myanmar and Thailand. Their plight often does not receive much media attention. When I led the Karen song See-P’truh-Nah (“God Is Good”) last year at a church in Seoul, a group of Karen refugees were present and expressed surprise that I knew a song in their language.
I have also introduced songs in Arabic and Farsi, such as Abaan alla- dhi fi (“Our Father in Heaven”) and Roohol Ghodos (“Spirit of God”), at multiple churches in North America for their Sunday services or mission events. This provides a way for them to stand with Christ followers in the Middle East whose voices often seem to be missing in evangelical spaces.
Nevertheless, I recognize that singing in a language no one knows has its challenges, especially for very large-scale gatherings.
The Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea, this year had more than 5,000 Christians from over 200 countries attend in person and around 2,000 participate online. Throughout the weeklong gathering, Korean band Isaiah 6tyOne led most songs in English, singing some verses in Spanish and Korean and one song in Chinese. Northern Irish worship leaders Keith and Kristyn Getty sang in English and Spanish. The songs chosen were also predominantly written by Western or English-speaking composers.
“We acknowledge that we were not able to achieve the same level of diversity in our times of worship through music,” Evi Rodemann, the Congress’s event coordinator, told me in an email. “Given the logistical and organizational considerations, we focused on integrating two bands into the program to ensure a high-quality and cohesive musical experience.”
As a worship leader, I can imagine how arranging for songs to be sung in a foreign tongue at a large international conference might be hard. Learning an unfamiliar song and making it engaging for the congregation takes effort and intentionality. Honoring the song’s cultural origins through ensuring good pronunciation, while aiming for musical excellence at the same time, might require more hours of practice.
If the song lacks readily available charts, recordings, or licensing, creating such resources from scratch and integrating them into existing worship planning and media platforms may also be time-consuming.
Despite these challenges, lifting praises to God in a language we don’t know can be a meaningful spiritual practice that deepens our awareness of the all-encompassing and steadfast love that Christ has for his bride, the church.
To do this well congregationally, we can begin by adopting an attitude of humility and curiosity.
Before I introduce a song in an unfamiliar language, I make sure to check with a native speaker to ensure the words I want to articulate are said correctly. “My pronunciation won’t be perfect, and if I mispronounce anything, please forgive me and teach me so I can do better next time,” I often confess.
We can also choose to broaden the sources of the music we select for communal worship.
Every song is born out of a specific context. When we sing a song from another part of the world, we not only bring a particular culture’s language into our congregation but also welcome that country’s story and its lived theology in word and melody.
This is an exercise in mutuality: It moves us away from a posture that reflects a need to “sing our songs” to one that demonstrates greater openness, saying “Let’s sing each other’s songs,” argues Ian Collinge, a UK-based musician and intercultural worship trainer, in the book Arts Across Cultures: Reimagining the Christian Faith in Asia.
My organization, Proskuneo Ministries, and Songs2Serve provide ready-to-use songs in languages such as Arabic, Korean, and Spanish. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship has a multilingual hymnal, Psalms for All Seasons, and a Spanish and English bilingual hymnal, Santo, Santo, Santo. The Global Ethnodoxology Network offers a large collection of Christian songs written by artists around the world. And the Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) is also making its songs searchable by language.
My multiethnic, multicultural worshiping community in Clarkston, Georgia, has immigrants and refugees from Myanmar, Syria, and South Sudan. We sing songs and take turns reading each verse of Scripture in Arabic, Burmese, Korean, and Spanish. We pray out loud, simultaneously, in our primary languages. And we have chicken shawarma, japchae, and mac and cheese casserole together.
Doing church in these ways might sound messy, even unappealing. But it’s a wholly intentional approach, even when cultural and linguistic differences may make interactions frustrating and cause misunderstandings to arise.
While we need more time and effort to clarify and over-communicate so that we can better understand one another’s intentions and create more-inclusive liturgies of worship, my church has tasted, seen, and experienced the joys of worshiping in languages we don’t understand with Jesus followers from around the world. For the young people in my community, doing so has become the norm.
When we witness to the diversity of the church in our rhythms of worship, we hear Christ’s prayer—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)—being answered. We get a foretaste of the nations bringing their beauty and honor into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24, 26). We contribute to an aural depiction of Scripture’s declaration that every tongue will acknowledge “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11).
However we may fumble or feel uncomfortable when singing in a language we do not understand, we yield the entirety of our human faculties, especially our capacities for comprehension and speech, in loving surrender unto God when we do so.
And with one voice, no matter how discordant or incomprehensible, we join with our siblings in Christ to declare, Yezu azali awa. Yesu woo-ri-wa-ham gge. “Jesus is here with us.”
Jaewoo Kim serves in public relations and ministry development at Proskuneo Ministries and is the author of Willingly Uncomfortable Worship.
