Forty-Seven Nationalities, One Sunday Service: Live Translation at Village Church Brisbane

Village Church meets each Sunday at Kelvin Grove and Spring Hill, in inner-city Brisbane. The congregation is drawn from forty-seven nationalities, gathered in a city where English is the common language but rarely the heart language. For Senior Pastor Sam McGeown, that diversity is the whole point — and the longstanding question has been how to make Sunday morning genuinely accessible for every member in the room.

Trying Everything

Long before Sunflower AI came along, Sam and the Village Church team had tried just about every available approach to multilingual worship. None of them quite worked.

We have 47 nationalities in our church, and we’ve tried lots of different ways to incorporate and to include people from different cultures and different ethnicities into the life of our church — and we’ve always struggled.

During the sermon, they would take students and other non-English speakers out of the service to do a parallel Bible study in their first language. They handed out wireless translation headsets, with a volunteer at the back of the church live-translating into Spanish for Spanish-speaking members. Each of those approaches solved one piece of the puzzle for one language — but none made the whole of Sunday morning, from the call to worship to the closing announcement, accessible in one go.

Then Came Sunflower

And then we came across Sunflower, and to be honest, we couldn’t believe that something like Sunflower could exist. It’s been an incredible help for our church — being able to provide a translation, a script that people can access, or with earbuds as well to access the translation through earbuds.

Sunflower AI’s live translation runs from the church’s existing audio feed and delivers real-time captions and audio in 81 languages. There are no headsets to hand out, no separate room, no volunteer to schedule. Members scan a QR code on the run sheet, choose their language, and read or listen along on their own phone — no app install required.

For Sam and the team, the change was immediate.

”The First Time He’d Ever Understood the Gospel in His Own Language”

The moment Sam keeps coming back to is the first Sunday they used Sunflower AI live.

I remember the first time we ever used it. We’d been preaching on the Prodigal Son, and a young guy came up to me after the service and said it’s the first time that he’s ever understood the Gospel in his own language.

From that moment on, members who had previously sat through services they couldn’t follow could engage with every part of Sunday morning — the sermon, the songs, the Bible reading, even the prayers and the announcements.

Beyond Sunday: Multilingual Bible Studies

Village Church has also taken Sunflower AI into its mid-week life. The church now runs Bible studies in Spanish, English, and Japanese, and members from different cultural backgrounds use Sunflower AI to follow the conversation in their own language.

We’ve had Spanish Bible studies, English Bible studies, and Japanese Bible studies — different people from different cultures in those studies as well — and they’ve been able to use the Sunflower app as part of that.

What used to require a separate room and a dedicated translator is now part of the ordinary rhythm of small-group ministry.

A Sermon for Everyone in the Room

In Acts 2, the Gospel is heard by people from every nation, each in their own language. For Village Church Brisbane, that ancient story is becoming a weekly reality.

We highly recommend the app. It’s been an incredible help for us, and it’s a great way to make people feel included and part of our worship service — no matter what background they’re from, no matter where they’re from.