Curtis Chapel preacher Harter delivers sermon on church roof last Sunday

Preaching from the roof a church tradition for meeting attendance goals
The congregants of Curtis Chapel, just outside of Marionville, had a slightly different church service on Sunday, July 7. Instead of preaching from the pulpit, Phillip Harter, the church’s assistant pastor, climbed on top of the church building’s roof to deliver his sermon.
Harter’s preaching from the church’s rooftop was due to the church exceeding their attendance goal on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 16. The church had set a goal of having 50 people attend; their attendance that day was 77.
It is actually a tradition at Curtis Chapel for a pastor to preach on the building’s roof when an attendance goal is met, Harter said, though it has been about two decades since the last time a pastor went to the top of the building.
“The church has had an ongoing thing for about 30 years that was started by one of their previous pastors,” Harter said. “(It) said that if they could reach an attendance goal, whatever that goal was at the time, he would preach the next service off the roof. They did that three or four times while he was here, and it’s happened, I think, twice since he was here. That’s been probably close to 20 years ago.”
Harter’s sermon focused on what he said was a lack of leadership by men in the church, the community and the family.
Harter also told congregants that America is in a moral decline because people are only willing to follow God up to a point, Christians are more about pleasing people than God, and because men haven’t been the leaders at home they are supposed to be.