Preaching to the Room That's Not There Yet — How to Reach the Unchurched Through Your Sunday Message

Carey Nieuwhof's 2025 church trend research surfaced a statistic that should stop every pastor cold: only one percent of pastors rate their church as very effective at reaching people who have no church background. One percent. After decades of outreach programming, evangelism training, church growth methodology, and cultural relevance conversations, the overwhelming majority of churches in America have a Sunday morning that is almost entirely inaccessible to the people who most need what happens there.

Part of this is structural — the church has always struggled to reach those who do not come. But part of it is homiletical. The way most preachers are trained to preach assumes a level of biblical literacy and theological familiarity that a growing percentage of the culture simply does not have. The room that is there — the one full of people who already know the language and the stories and the assumptions — gets fed. The room that is not there yet — the one full of people who would be confused, alienated, or talked past by the average Sunday message — never gets invited back.

Understanding Who Isn't in the Room

The unchurched person who might one day find their way into your church does not share your background assumptions about the authority of Scripture, the basic contours of the gospel, or the meaning of common religious language. They may have a vague spirituality that bears little resemblance to Christian theology. They may have been hurt by a church or a religious family member and carry that wound into the room. They may simply be curious — responding to an invitation from a friend, open to something but not knowing what — and completely without the cultural competence to decode what is happening around them.

They are not stupid. They are not hostile. They are not a problem to be solved. They are people made in the image of God, for whom Christ died, who are sitting in your church because something brought them there, and who will decide within the first few minutes of your sermon whether to come back based on whether what you are saying seems to have anything to do with their actual life.

"The room that is not there yet is full of people who will decide within the first few minutes whether what you are saying has anything to do with their actual life."

Preaching That Includes Without Compromising

Preaching to the unchurched does not mean abandoning theological substance or diluting the gospel to the point of inoffensiveness. The goal is not a message that does not challenge anyone — it is a message whose challenge is accessible, whose terms are defined, and whose assumptions are made explicit rather than assumed.

In practice, this means defining terms that feel obvious to the regular attender but are not: what is grace, exactly? What does "the cross" mean, and why does it matter? What is the church, and what is it for? It means connecting the text to universal human experiences — longing, failure, grief, hope, the search for meaning — before connecting it to specific theological categories. And it means adopting a posture in the pulpit that is genuinely curious and genuinely inviting rather than one that speaks from assumed authority to assumed agreement.

What Happens to Your Regular Attenders

Here is what many pastors fear but should not: that preaching in a way that is accessible to the unchurched will bore or diminish the experience for the theologically formed regular attender. The opposite tends to be true. Sermons that begin with genuine human reality, that take the time to surface and address objections rather than assuming agreement, and that connect the gospel to the actual texture of ordinary life tend to be more engaging for everyone — including the person who has been in the church for decades. Depth and accessibility are not opposites. The best preaching achieves both.