Passing the Lobby Test: Reaching People Who Don’t Go to Church
Vince Antonucci uses what he calls the “lobby test” to see whether a church is reaching people who have never attended church before. His observations challenge churches to see themselves through outsiders’ eyes and to create a welcoming environment for first-time visitors. The question he asks presses believers to reflect on whether they are truly attracting the lost the way Jesus did.
- Many churches are better at attracting transfers than reaching people who have never attended church.
- Welcoming outsiders often requires stepping outside familiar church culture and comfort zones.
- The mission to “seek and to save the lost” should shape how churches connect with first-time visitors.
By Mark A. Taylor
Vince Antonucci likes to perform what he calls the “lobby test.”
When he’s visiting a church away from the one where he preaches, Forefront Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, he always arrives early. A friendly fellow, he easily speaks with people he’s never met before. But when he’s performing the lobby test, his chit chat has a purpose.
After getting acquainted with someone in the lobby, he asks, “So, where did you go to church before you started coming here?” He doesn’t want the answer he usually gets, the name of another church across town.
He’s hoping his acquaintance will tell him, “Oh, this is the first church we’ve ever attended.” Then he will have found a non Christian reached by the church for Christ, instead of a Christ follower who decided to transfer from one congregation to another. “Sometimes I talk to 40 or more people and don’t find one who never went to church before,” Vince reports.
Seeing Church Through an Outsider’s Eyes
He has come to a startling conclusion: “Churches aren’t that good at reaching lost people!” We don’t want to believe him, but most church leaders have been Christians for so long, we can’t really see church the way outsiders do.
We say we’re friendly, but too often we’re friendlier to each other than to first timers. We say non Christians are welcome, but too often that means they’re welcome on our terms: understand our words, like our music, figure out our traditions.
Vince suggests we get outside our comfort zone to experience what an unchurched person might feel visiting us for the first time. Attend a Muslim service. Visit the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
A Church for People Who Don’t Like Church
“We want to be a church for people who don’t like church,” Vince says of Forefront. That mission has driven him to create a Sunday morning experience that would threaten or even offend some of us.
But 72 percent of Forefront’s members and attendees are folks who never went to church before. The church has grown to about 600 from a start of just six when Vince, his wife, another couple, and two toddlers began the church in 1998.
Vince quotes Jesus, whose mission on earth was clear: “I have come to seek and to save the lost.”
“We’re trying to be good at what Jesus was good at,” Vince says, “attracting sinful people to himself and then loving them.”
Jesus accomplished this without compromising anything true or holy. He was sinless! Vince asks a question that haunts me as I think about my church, my neighborhood, my whole life: “If I’m not attracting sinful people to me, how much am I like Jesus?”
My answer could help my church pass the lobby test and that would be just the beginning.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
