Two generations under one sermon: how Tucson Young Nak Church serves first- and second-generation Koreans

Tucson Young Nak Church is a Korean-speaking congregation on the north-west side of Tucson, Arizona. Sunday worship runs in Korean for the adults; a Sunday school and youth ministry run in English for the kids who have grown up in Tucson. Once a month, the two halves of the church gather for a single combined service — still in Korean — and that is where Sunflower AI comes in.

Hangil, who also goes by Paul, is a Deacon at the church and the treasurer of its Young Adults ministry. He recorded a short testimony about the multi-generational service, and about what getting the translation right means for keeping two generations of Korean Americans inside the same Sunday gathering:

Why the multi-generational service exists

Hangil’s framing starts with a problem that has had a name in the American Korean church world for thirty years: the children of immigrant believers tend to drift away from their parents’ congregations once they leave home. Tucson Young Nak’s once-a-month combined service is the church’s small-scale answer — a deliberate attempt to give kids the rhythm of a Korean-language gathering before they’re old enough to find their own.

We wanted our younger generation to have a similar experience to what they’re going to be used to when they grow up and go to a Korean church. It was not an easy transition to go from growing up in a Korean church straight into an American church when they went to college, and it ends up not working out for them — and they end up leaving the church.

Most Korean churches in the United States handle the language split by running two parallel services: a Korean-language service for the parents and an English-language service for the kids. Tucson Young Nak runs that pattern for three Sundays a month. On the fourth, it does something different.

The Korean church-terminology problem

Before Sunflower AI, the team experimented with the obvious solutions and ran out of road quickly:

We tried different things, like manual translation — one of our church members doing translation through audio. It was not as good as we hoped it would be.

A live human translator is a beautiful thing on a good week. The realities of single-translator volunteering — the same person, every Sunday, week after week — tend to wear it out. From there, the team looked at general-purpose AI subtitle tools and ran into the specific problem that makes Korean church translation harder than the simpler European pairs:

Everyone who could understand both languages thought the translation level was almost perfect. There’s particular church terminology in Korean that is not easily translatable into English — which we found to be a problem for other translation services. But Sunflower has been really good for that.

Korean theological vocabulary is a real stress test for general-purpose translation. Words a Korean pastor uses every Sunday — eunhye (grace), seongnyeong (Holy Spirit), guwon (salvation) — carry plain everyday meanings outside church speech too, and a model that doesn’t know it’s listening to a sermon often defaults to the everyday gloss. Sunflower AI accepts a sermon-preload before the service — a script, notes, or just the day’s Bible passages, pasted into the captions panel — and the transcription engine uses that text to lock onto the in-house theological vocabulary, proper nouns, and biblical references that a general model would otherwise miss.

A shared sermon, a shared conversation

The piece of Hangil’s testimony that stayed with us isn’t about the technology at all. It’s about the conversation the technology unlocks:

Because we have this multi-generational service, we are able to connect different groups together. Parents, when they go to church, want to share the experience of church and Christianity together with their kids. But before, because we had multiple services, it was not as easy. Now that we have a single service that we’re able to share between the different generations, they can go after church when they’re driving home and discuss the sermon. I think it helps connect the different generations together better.

Two separate Sunday services — one in Korean for the parents and one in English for the kids — can fund themselves operationally, but they don’t produce a shared object of conversation. Nobody has heard the same sermon. A single bilingual service produces, by definition, one sermon: whether the parents heard it in Korean and the kids read it in English, both groups are working from the same text by Sunday lunchtime.

Hangil makes the point personally:

We have a lot of first-generation Koreans that come to our church. As a second-generation myself, it’s sometimes hard to connect with our parents in a way — their experience in Korea and how they grew up is a lot different from how we grew up. Having this time where we can talk to each other about different things is very important.

The silent exodus

The drift Hangil describes has a thirty-year history of its own. Helen Lee’s 1996 Christianity Today cover story coined “silent exodus” for the pattern of younger Asian American believers leaving their parents’ immigrant churches as they came of age. The article cited studies that found 80 percent of second-generation Korean Americans hoped to attend a church where English was the primary language, and that the bulk of them did indeed leave their parents’ churches — often, eventually, leaving the faith too.

Three decades later, the underlying picture has not changed as much as anyone hoped. Pew Research’s 2023 study of Asian American religion finds 59 percent of Korean Americans still identify as Christian — among the highest Christian-affiliation rates of any large Asian American origin group — but the generational drift continues. For a single Korean church in a mid-sized American city like Tucson, that drift is a real, named force. The kids in the Sunday school upstairs are growing up in English. The question is whether they will still be in the church downstairs when they are thirty.

A monthly bilingual service is not on its own a solution to the silent exodus. What it does offer is a regular Sunday a month on which the parents and the children hear the same sermon together, in their respective heart languages, and have something to talk about on the drive home. For a church the size of Tucson Young Nak, that is a meaningful thing to be able to offer.

What we hope for from here

If you are a pastor or AV lead in a Korean American church — or in any heritage-language church where the second generation is growing up in English — and you are trying to build a service that holds both halves of the room, we’d love to talk. The Tucson Young Nak setup is small: one laptop running Sunflower at the lectern, captions visible on every phone in the room, no headsets required. Most of the work is the decision to try.