A piece of live translation technology is being offered to churches for free this Christmas so that congregants who struggle with English can understand the gospel message.
‘Breeze Translate’ was developed by a small volunteer team at Christian-based tech competition, Kingdom Code Build.
It records a preach live and offers real-time subtitles to congregants in over 240 languages.
Product lead Mike Ashelby told Premier Christian News that it is the Great Commission in action.
“A multicultural church in Leicester brought the idea to us,” he said. “It’s been a very exciting story… my wife is a vicar, and we work so hard to get people through the door, especially at Christmas time. But if they can’t understand the service, it’s all just noise.”
“It means that someone who speaks Farsi can stand up and give a word of knowledge, or say a prayer in their native language, and everybody can receive that,” Ashelby said.
‘Breeze’ is named after Acts 2, when “the blowing of a mighty wind came from heaven," before the disciples were given the gift on tongues to share the gospel in many languages.
The project is run by a volunteer team to keep costs as low as possible for smaller churches. Yet, they plan for it to be an even greater labour of love this Christmas, as they offer a free trial for any church to use in their welcome services.
“I’m hoping that we're going to lose some money this Christmas,” Ashelby told Premier. “God has challenged us, saying: ‘Just go, go and bless the church.’ He's blessed us so much with our growth in the last six months that we just felt challenged by God to give this away as broadly as we can.”
Mike told Premier he “wells up” thinking of how God has grown the church through the tech already.
“We had one church tell us that somebody had been attending for seven years, and never fully understood a service [until] Breeze.
“Another told us that they had 15 people being baptised, who had come along in their faith to that point of baptism, because they had been able to follow [the message], using Breeze Translate.”
“The more this grows, the more stories we hear,” Ashelby said. “We're just so excited to be able to help.”