Grace Place Church of God by Faith is located in Clayton, County, Georgia, a predominantly Black community. As of today, only about 46% of its 292,000 residents are fully vaccinated. But thanks to the determined efforts of a local pastor, more than 90% of his parishioners are fully vaccinated—and not one has died from COVID-19.
Grace Place’s Pastor Wayne Mack is not your usual community activist. He’s not in the streets protesting, signing petitions, or writing letters to his local lawmakers. But when COVID-19 was just a blip on the map in China in Feb. 2020, Mack addressed it straight-on using science and scripture to warn his congregants of what he was convinced was coming and to protect them from getting sick or dying.
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Mack says everything started when his wife, Michelle, began watching a documentary about the 1918 Spanish flu. At around 20 minutes in, he says, he realized that COVID-19 was coming to the U.S. There were no recorded cases at that time, but he knew from watching that it was fast heading from China to America. That’s when he began to spread the word.
“I'm like, ‘No, this is not going to be a snow day.’ I think most people were thinking we’d be shut down maybe two weeks. And I was saying, ‘No, it's going to be more than two weeks. This thing will not subside. I don't see it ending before November, in Thanksgiving,’” Mack told Daily Kos.
The Atlanta pastor jumped into action. He says he has a member of the church who works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Benita Harris-McBride, 57, who holds a master’s degree in public health. She was telling him that everything he was thinking, every imaginable scenario, was real. So the first thing he did was ask all of his congregants and the church’s national leaders to watch the documentary about the 1918 Spanish flu.
Grace Place has about 100 members, most of whom are Black, and the median age is about 50. Mack tells Daily Kos they all thought it was ironic when his sermon the first Sunday after sending out a letter about the 1918 Spanish flu was titled “Closed on Sundays.” The newsletter had been planned for weeks—using the Chick-Fil-A model and a Kanye West song—to talk about life being sacred on Sundays. But in reality, Grace Place would shut down about two weeks after Mack sent out his warning letter.
Mack says another congregant, LaBrentha Lonon, 52, is a registered nurse in neuroscience at Emory University Hospital who works with stroke patients. Mack says Lonon spoke with the congregation early on in the pandemic—and told them bluntly that patients hospitalized with COVID who don’t improve within five days usually die.
Mack, who’s been leading Grace Place since 1988, says because his congregation trusts him that the word of God “trumped everything in the congregation” and he was able to fight against misinformation and distrust.
“We continued to deliver the message to respect the virus, and we used Zoom, Facebook LIve, email blasts, and the church’s mobile app to drive home that message,” Mack says.
He also started incorporating science into his sermons.
“I didn't get into the crazies. I immediately started to dispel us overly spiritualizing this [virus], theorizing it, and politicizing it. I addressed it head-on and I did it with scripture,” Mack says.
Mack’s Easter message was titled “Whose report do you believe?”—a quote from the Book of Isaiah.
“But all of my messages, I can tell you, for the past two years, and I've only just started to pull back, every message has had to do with the pandemic and COVID-19.”
When the vaccines became available, he says he had to address the trepidation in the Black community when it comes to the health care system, and he referred to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment: Between 1932 and 1972, the CDC and the U.S. Public Health Service recruited about 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, and gave placebos to the half of the group with diagnosed syphilis, despite the fact that penicillin had become available in 1947—some 15 years into the study.
Mack convinced his congregation by employing “Church chats” at the end of sermons, where parishioners could ask questions of Lonon or Harris-McBride. He says there was no pressure or judgment either way about the vaccines, and it took a few months, but as of today 90% of the parishioners are vaccinated and no one in the church has died of COVID-19.
The church also held a vaccine pop-up clinic, in partnership with the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, MECCA Chapter, and the Conference of National Black Churches, and Walgreens, providing nurses on-hand to administer Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines, booster shots, and flu vaccines. U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, a Georgia Democrat, who’d already gotten her COVID-19 vaccine and booster, got a flu shot at the event.
The church recently opened for in-person services, but members must be vaccinated to attend and masks must be worn.
“I’m not a scientist. I was just trying to speak common sense. And I wasn't speaking from a pastoral standpoint either. I was just trying to at least reach my people.”
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