At our church, we will from time to time sing multilingual songs, typically in English and Spanish. For a while, I didn’t like this; we’re an English-speaking American church. I’d even try to spiritualize it — it’s not good to sing songs as worship when we don’t know what we’re singing, I reasoned, and many (most?) of us don’t know what the Spanish means other than a few words here and there. Most of the time the translation was provided, but sometimes it was absent (or was on a different page and not visible with the Spanish).

I knew about Revelation 7:9, that God is in the business of redeeming a people from every language. I knew that Heaven would be a place of multilingual praise. But in the here and now, and in the practice of the church visible, I wanted it to be in my language.

Then our pastor for Latino ministry spoke one week about our church’s Spanish-speaking ministries, and my sin was exposed.

What I didn’t know, while I was sitting in the pew being an Anglo-centric pig, was that there were Latino brothers and Latina sisters sitting in the balcony. Their English, if they knew any, wasn’t very good. They had headphones so they could hear a live Spanish translation of the service. Many of them frequently attended a bilingual evening service in South Minneapolis, but they wanted to be able to join with the rest of the church. The songs which I was resenting provided an opportunity for them to enter in to worship with us more fully. Sure, I don’t know much of the Spanish, but we have people in our congregation, worshiping with us, for whom the English is just as impermeable. I was saying that they didn’t matter, that they were irrelevant, that our attempts to reach out across linguistic, ethnic, and cultural divides should not find expression in corporate worship.

I now praise God for these songs. A polyglot song prompts me not to resentment or disdain, but to praise and prayer for my Spanish-speaking brethren. Praise that God is working in our city amongst those who haven’t yet learned our language. Praise that Jesus is redeeming a people from every language, and that we can get a small foretaste of that now. It grieves me that my heart was so black so as to marginalize my brothers and sisters for whom Christ died.

So bring on the multilingual songs! Especially the ones that aren’t just translations, but are written bilingually. And if your church has multilingual outreaches, consider incorporating that into worship. Done deliberately and communicated well, it can raise awareness of what God is doing in your church and community.