Easter Sunday is 5 April this year, and it is the Sunday the people who never come, come. Some of them will not speak your language. Here is a four-week plan to be ready for them: the languages, the names, the sound desk, the welcome at the door and a rehearsal on Palm Sunday.
Easter Sunday falls on 5 April this year. In most churches it is the fullest Sunday of the year: the family home for the holidays, the neighbour who comes once a year, the students far from home, the couple who moved to the city last autumn, the grandparents visiting from another country. The whole city comes.
More of them than you think will not follow a sermon in your language. They will sit politely through the most important message of the church year, read the faces around them, and go home having watched Easter rather than heard it.
This is a plan to change that, starting four weeks out.
Every Sunday matters. But Easter is the Sunday the gospel is told in its plainest words: he is risen. It is also the Sunday a first-time guest decides, often without noticing, whether this is a place they could come back to. A guest who understood the sermon and laughed when the room laughed may be there again the next Sunday. A guest who understood nothing usually is not.
You cannot know in advance exactly who will walk in. You can be ready for them anyway.
Start with what you already know. Who came last Christmas? Which languages do your international members speak at home, and whose families will visit at Easter? Ask your small group leaders, your youth leader and the people who run the coffee table. They know who is coming.
Add those languages to your room, and one or two more than you expect to need. Each guest chooses the language on their own phone, so having another one ready asks nothing of anybody at the door. Most languages can be both read and heard as a voice; a few can be read as text only. The languages page shows which.
Before you ask a congregation to trust something, try it. The speaker demo lets anyone on your team speak into their own microphone and watch it come out translated, without an account. Ask a member who speaks one of your Easter languages to follow along and tell you how it reads.
Then run it on an ordinary Sunday. Press start before the service, put the code on the screen, and let the welcome team and a few international members follow. Ask them afterwards what was hard, and fix that first.
Easter services are full of names: your church, your pastors, the choir, the guest soloist, the families bringing children for baptism, the street you meet on. Names are where live translation stumbles first, because they are not in any dictionary.
Every room now has a keywords list for them. Add the names and terms that must never be guessed at, and they come through intact in every language. Ten minutes with the order of service and a pen covers it. More on the keywords page.
The cleanest signal comes from the sound desk: one cable from the desk into the laptop that runs the room, carrying the preacher's microphone, and the readers' too if they use another one. Set it up once, check it on a normal Sunday, and on Easter morning it is already there. More on the sound and media side.
On the day, press start before the service begins. The speaker's screen shows each listener as they join and the language they chose, so whoever sits at the desk can see that guests are in and following without walking over to ask. A guest who joins early sees that the service has not started yet, not an empty screen.
If your Easter weekend includes Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and a sunrise service, use the same room for all of them. The code and the link stay the same, so a guest who joined on Friday is ready on Sunday.
Palm Sunday, 29 March, is your dress rehearsal. Run everything the way you will on Easter morning: the code on the screen during the welcome, the sentence from the front, the room running from the first word of the sermon to the last. Watch how many people join, notice where the welcome team had to help, and adjust.
Most of the work on the day happens at the door, and it is small.
Put the code everywhere a guest looks: on the screen during the welcome slides, in the printed bulletin, on a card at the welcome desk. Give the greeters one sentence: "If you would like to follow in your own language, scan this with your phone." Practise it in two or three of your Easter languages if you can. Say it once from the front, before the sermon, in the simplest words you have. Mention earbuds, but do not depend on them. The text is silent, so a guest without earbuds simply reads. Let people set it up for themselves. Text size and volume are on each person's own phone, so nobody has to ask for help.
There is no app to download and no account to create. A guest who has never heard of MulingStream is following the service a few seconds after pointing their camera at the code. You can see the guest's side on how it works for listeners.
You cannot know who will walk in on Easter morning. You can be ready for them anyway.
The Sunday after Easter is when you find out whether the welcome worked. Some of the guests will come back. Leave the room running, keep the code on the screen, and they will find their language waiting for them.
Two and a half weeks before Easter, on 19 March 2026, the translation became smart: it follows what the preacher means in context, rather than going word by word. On the same day we released Smart Hints. When the preacher quotes a verse, the guest sees it from a widely used Bible translation in their own language. On Easter morning, when the pastor says "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said", a guest reads Matthew 28:6 in the words of their own Bible. Read more about Smart Translation.
Since 2 April 2026, Context Enhancer lets you give the room the topic, the passages, the names and the phrases of the service before it begins, and keywords are part of every room. Next Easter, the night before is enough: paste the order of service and the sermon outline, and the room arrives knowing what the day is about.
Two days after Easter, on 7 April 2026, we released MulingDisplay: the translation as live captions on the church screen. On the fullest Sunday of the year, not every guest has a phone in hand or wants one out. A screen asks nothing of anybody.
Since 19 June 2026, the speaker can download a printable handout for the room: the QR code, the room name and simple joining steps, in the room's languages. Put a stack at the welcome desk or a card on each seat, and the guest who would never ask for help can join on their own.
Since 2 September 2026, churches use church passes: prepaid, never expiring, and spent only when somebody actually listens, with one pass covering the whole gathering and everyone listening. For Easter, a Day Pass covers every service that day, an International Day Pass suits a day when the room speaks many languages, and a Week Pass that starts on Maundy Thursday covers Good Friday, Easter Sunday and the days after. See them side by side on pricing for churches, and read Church passes are here.
Open the listener demo room on your phone, choose a language, and you will see what a guest sees, at any hour of the day.
We show you the whole thing live, in about fifteen minutes. Nothing is decided on the call and nothing follows it: you see it, and then you are the judge.