It all started in a living room.
Rieneke Visser and her husband were leading their first church plant in Rotterdam. It was the early 2000s, and they were blessed with a church community from a variety of cultures, who met together in a home, sharing meals and conversations – as well as songs. The group would often learn worship songs from each other’s cultures, in each other’s languages, which brought them much joy.
But two years later, as the church grew, Rieneke noticed a shift. Not everyone was engaged in times of corporate worship. When an African group was on the stage, Dutch members would be sitting with their arms folded, waiting for them to finish. Kurdish attendees from Muslim backgrounds struggled with worshipping in song at all, since this wasn’t the norm in Islam.
Rieneke was desperate to see everyone worshipping together in unity, so she tried finding songs in different languages to engage people from all cultures at the church. Later, she ran music training sessions about intercultural worship with groups in the church planting network they led. After a friend suggested she turn her efforts into a formal project, she started Songs2Serve in 2014.
Rieneke, alongside a group of teammates in the Netherlands, collected songs and translated lyrics into multiple languages for Christian communities to use in worship. The group felt it was important not only to translate English songs into other languages but to find songs from Iraq, Africa, and other places and translate them into multiple languages, too. In 2016, they published 30 songs on the Songs2Serve website, but today, the collection has nearly 100 songs, with over 60 languages represented.
In 2025, Songs2Serve had 83,000 users from all over the world, according to Rieneke. The organization’s song database is now turning 10 years old, and there are plenty of stories of God using the ministry to bless people over that time. A Turkish woman from a Muslim background accepted Jesus after singing the Lord’s Prayer in her own language. A Sri Lankan man came to a gathering of believers and was so astounded to see people singing in a language not their own that he decided to learn more about Christianity and join the church. A group of Chinese believers who’d moved to Greece were moved to tears when they got a chance to worship in Mandarin, something they thought they’d never be able to experience again after leaving China.
For anyone who’s interested in fostering a culture of intercultural worship in their own church communities, Rieneke recommended starting out by reading “An Intercultural Worship Handbook,” by Ian Collinge, and then giving a copy to your church leaders and engaging them in a conversation about this topic. Then join our 6 session online course “Introduction to Intercultural Worship”, suitable for anyone involved in leading worship, small groups or Sunday services.
“I have seen so much of the beauty of intercultural worship. For example, the depth of God’s love in hearts being touched, and the various expressions of joy, love, and surrender,” she said, adding, “The Lord uses so many different tools to reach the hearts of people, and He is so much after their heart, that He will not rest until He finds them.”
You can find Songs2Serve’s song collection here. If you’d like to suggest songs for the team to add to the database, please email them at info@songs2serve.eu. You can also keep an eye out for upcoming training sessions on intercultural worship here.
