AI Appreciation Day is coming. Churches will get their share of attention. Much of it will follow a familiar script.
AI-powered translation is entering American ministry. Congregations use it to offer live translations of worship services in multiple languages, without teams of interpreters. Companies like Wordly are behind much of this. More than 68 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home. It is easy to see why churches are paying attention. One church reported its highest Easter attendance in 40 years after introducing live AI translation across its campuses.
That story is real. It deserves attention.
But it is not the only story.
Jack Nassar
Across the United States, Arab and Middle Eastern Christian communities carry liturgical traditions older than the English language itself. Copts pray in Arabic alongside Coptic, the liturgical descendant of ancient Egyptian. Assyrian, Chaldean, Maronite and Syriac Christians worship in Arabic and Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic close to the language Jesus spoke. Armenian churches keep their liturgy in Classical Armenian, with some Arabic mixed in. Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Egyptian, Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian Christians worship in Arabic, carrying traditions that reach back to the earliest centuries of the faith.
More than 3.7 million Arab Americans live in the United States. Roughly 60% are Christian. Arab Christians are one of the oldest and most established Middle Eastern communities in the country. They did not come to America, or to Latin America, Canada, Australia and Europe, searching for a new faith. They arrived carrying one of the oldest expressions of Christianity, trying to keep it alive in a new homeland.
That inheritance is what is at risk now.
Walk into a Palestinian, Antiochian, Coptic or Armenian parish in Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco or Los Angeles on a Sunday morning. You will see it immediately. A grandmother follows every prayer in Arabic. Her grandson understands only part of it. He was born in Ohio. English is the language he thinks in, dreams in, speaks every day. The priest chants a hymn first sung centuries ago in Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus or Alexandria. Somewhere in the pews, a 14-year-old quietly checks out.
I have seen this myself, in immigrant churches across the U.S. and Europe. Not only Arab and Middle Eastern congregations. Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Asian, Spanish and others too. The language barrier does its work quietly. It pushes some of the younger generation toward English, or toward whatever language carries their new national identity. It pushes others out of the church altogether.
What I saw most was not rebellion. It was drift.
“AI cannot recreate Pentecost but it might help churches honor that same instinct.”
Confusion on young faces during long stretches of the liturgy. Restlessness that comes from not understanding. Boredom that hardens, over time, into absence.
This struggle is not new. Immigrant churches have wrestled with it for generations. Keep the ancestral language and risk losing the younger generation. Move entirely to English and risk losing the richness that gives the liturgy its depth. Many churches land somewhere in between. Bilingual services where everyone understands something but no one experiences everything.
AI translation could change that.
The grandmother keeps her Arabic. Her grandson hears the same prayers and sermon in English, through a small earpiece, live. Neither one gives up the language that connects them to their faith.
Christianity always has been multilingual. At Pentecost, the miracle was not that everyone suddenly spoke one language. It was that people from many nations heard the same message in their own tongues. AI cannot recreate Pentecost but it might help churches honor that same instinct, making the faith understandable without forcing everyone into one language.
For many smaller parishes, the choice is not between AI translation and a skilled human interpreter. It is between AI translation and no translation at all. A congregation without the budget to hire interpreters for every service may otherwise leave part of its own community unable to follow the liturgy at all. That reality deserves weight too.
Sacred language is not ordinary language, though.
A sermon is not a business presentation. A liturgy is not a tourist brochure. When a Coptic priest chants Kyrie eleison, or an Antiochian deacon proclaims the Trisagion, those words are not just information waiting to be translated. They carry centuries of theology and memory. Generations of theologians, monks, bishops, patriarchs and church councils shaped them. A machine can capture the literal meaning. It cannot carry everything those words have come to hold.
“Getting the word right is not the same as carrying what centuries of chanting and memory have loaded into it.”
Some platforms now offer glossaries, letting churches preload the correct rendering of a name, a Scripture reference, a theological term. That solves one problem. It ensures the AI says the right word instead of a flattened paraphrase. But accuracy is not the same as reverence. A glossary can guarantee that Theotokos is translated correctly. It cannot guarantee that a listener hearing it through an earpiece feels what a Copt feels when that word is sung, in that voice, in that moment. Getting the word right is not the same as carrying what centuries of chanting and memory have loaded into it.
That does not mean AI has no place.
Scripture readings, sermons, Bible studies, conferences, announcements, educational events — these are places where live translation could serve the church well. But the oldest prayers and hymns deserve more care. Translation here is not only about language. It is about protecting meaning and reverence.
Churches should not ask whether to use AI. They should ask how.
Is it helping a grandson pray beside his grandmother? Or is it becoming an excuse never to teach him the language of his own heritage and the stories and practices that carry it forward? An earpiece can serve one generation well. It should never replace passing that inheritance to the next.
For Arab and Middle Eastern Christians in America, this is about more than technology or church growth. It is about protecting living traditions that survived empires, persecution, migration, exile. It is about making sure grandchildren stay connected to the faith their grandparents carried across oceans.
If AI can keep those generations worshipping together, without hollowing out the liturgy itself, it may be one of the more meaningful uses of artificial intelligence in the church.
If it cannot, we will have found a faster way to lose what generations fought to keep.
Jack Nassar is a Palestinian Christian writer focusing on the Palestine-Israel conflict and its social, political and religious dimensions. He holds a master of arts degree in political communications from Goldsmiths University of London.