The faith community is working to do its part in getting people vaccinated against COVID-19.
For the last eight months, since the first COVID-19 vaccines started rolling out, civic leaders have been urging people to get vaccinated.
But despite their pleas, the vaccination rate has stagnated as COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed.
Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley on Tuesday asked for some help.
"If we can get church leaders, community leaders, whomever, to set up an event and encourage the people they influence to come out, then we'll be there to give them a shot," Judge Whitley said during Commissioners Court on Tuesday.
Pastor Kyev Tatum of the New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth says his church has heeded the call.
"There's one system that we know that has not lost its confidence, and that's the church," says Tatum. "We created the Black on Base initiative to help pastors and communities who are on the front lines to be able to help conduct vaccination drives."
Tatum says the primary goal is to convince skeptics that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
"We understand that we have an essential responsibility at this hour to go into the communities and build up confidence and help them not only get vaccinated, but help them to get, as we say, Black on Base," Tatum says.
New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church accomplishes this by having a little fun in the process.
"We're trying to go into communities, assess communities, have a big block party with free barbecue and everything," says Tatum. "And then we continue to build that confidence up, and then we can discover the ways to help them get better."
But as fun as the block parties and free barbecue are, the message is simple and to the point -- people are much better off getting their COVID-19 shots.
"We're going in there for one purpose -- to build up people's confidence that they know they're better taking the vaccination than they are not," Tatum says, "that their chances of them going into the hospital and on a ventilator and subsequently dying decrease substantially by simply taking two shots of a vaccination."
And those vaccinations, Tatum says, are the key to ending the pandemic once and for all.
"This would be a pandemic that we could prevent from happening," says Tatum, "if we simply vaccinate the people that we love the most."
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