The collisions of a proton with a lithium atom are treated for the first time as a three-channel problem under the assumption that the elastic and hydrogen formation in non-excited, H(1s), and excited, H(2s), channels are open. The effect of polarization potentials of the target and hydrogen formation is considered. A one-valence-electron model for the target, based on the Clementi–Roetti Slater-type basis functions, as well as a modified coupled-static approximation are used to calculate the partial and total cross sections of seven partial waves (0 ≤ ℓ ≤ 6, where ℓ is the total angular momentum) at incident energies between 50 and 500 keV. Our values of the total cross section are in good agreement with previous results.