In 1961, Howard Butt Jr. was struggling. He was working as an executive in the H-E-B grocery company, his family’s business in Texas. He also was putting in many hours as a lay minister, traveling across the country with the Rev. Billy Graham.
Butt, who suffered from depression, found that he could no longer sustain this bivocational work. With the support of his parents, he made a choice: He would devote himself to ministry, founding Laity Lodge, a Christian retreat center in the Texas Hill Country.
His openness about his own mental health experience, as well as his mother’s long service in statewide mental health reform, anchor the family’s continued support for mental health and its intersection with the church.
That work continued when the H.E. Butt Foundation seeded The Congregational Collective, a nonprofit founded to equip congregations to become community leaders in mental health and wellness without stigma. The Foundation gifted $15 million over five years to The Collective.
“We know that churches are already working in this space. We know that they’re struggling to do the work well,” said Rebecca Brune, the executive director of The Congregational Collective.
“So how do we begin to create the pathways and relationships bridging public health and faith communities?”
In 2023, The Collective began a pilot project in San Antonio that combined rigorous studies, collective learning, training and resources to help congregations support mental wellness. It has since expanded to 18 congregations, and The Collective is creating resources and best practices that can be shared broadly.
Brune, who became executive director in 2024, has more than two decades of experience in the field, including at the Dallas-based Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. She spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: Talk a little bit about why the H.E. Butt Foundation started this program.
Rebecca Brune: In 2017, when Mr. Butt passed away, there was a large endowment from the grocery store, and they went through a strategic planning process and said, “We want to make a meaningful contribution. We’ve been gifted, and we want to give back.”
They said, “The Foundation’s focus has been mental health, church engagement and community work. What could that look like in practice?”
They hired UT San Antonio and did a research study. They worked with congregations across the city. They did surveys that asked, Are faith communities in this space? Do they want to be in this space? And are there learnings that need to happen?
Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute came in and looked at all the faith communities here in San Antonio to find out what they were doing in the space of mental health. They also did a best-practice analysis across the nation of other programs to benchmark, and then they made some recommendations.
The family then committed $15 million over five years to seed The Congregational Collective. We started with eight churches, and now we’ve grown to 18. We also have leveraged some funding from the John Templeton Foundation for research.
We’re looking at a couple of things. One is, What is the infrastructure, the foundational pieces that need to be put into place for churches and faith communities to be able to do this work well?
The second piece is, How can we work to create the linkages and relationships between public health, science, evidence-based interventions and community? How do we bridge those gaps?
F&L: Why is that intersection of mental health and faith important?
RB: So often, when people are in a state of distress, whether emotional, spiritual, or physical, people lean into their faith; they lean into their values. If you look throughout the Bible, our biblical traditions, the parables, the Psalms tell us and show us and demonstrate to us this power of healing.
There’s intersectionality between mental health and well-being and pointing to Scripture to guide and provide hope and ground us.
A lot of this journey has been pointing out that the tools are there. How do you create a culture within the church that celebrates this work, that creates a shared understanding —shared language — and uses the tools that we already have?
F&L: You started your pilot in 2023 with eight congregations. As a practical matter, what did this pilot look like?
RB: One of the things also that’s been really magical and interesting about the work is the learning community we’re forming.
The eight churches are from a variety of denominations. We have Baptist, Lutheran, evangelical nondenominational, Methodist, Catholic — you name it, we’ve got that. And now with the 18, we have even more.
We introduced some foundational training, including Spiritual First Aid and Sanctuary. Sanctuary really is about, How do you look beyond someone’s illness and look at them as a person? It really helps to destigmatize mental health, creates a shared understanding, a shared language that faith communities or congregations can lean into.
The second one is Spiritual First Aid. The reason we chose that is because it has a lens of trauma-informed care. It’s also evidence-based, and it has a framework called BLESS, which stands for biological, livelihood, emotional, social and spiritual needs — the holistic determinants of health.
You begin to look at all the critical risk factors in people’s lives that are oftentimes the triggers for emotional and mental distress. Those are the two foundational trainings.
We have a navigator in each of the churches, and we meet monthly with the navigators. We also do symposiums, we do trainings, we bring in community leaders and community content experts to talk about the delivery continuum, starting with early intervention and then going to crisis and connecting them with resources and community.
Each navigator is responsible for forming a team of ambassadors within the church. We come together quarterly as a group. It’s anywhere from 65 to 85 individuals.
We have a series of workshops and learning. One time, for example, we did a whole session on trauma-informed care, and then we did best practices and benchmarking. We did small work groups where they problem-solve with each other.
It’s just been amazing. It’s very interactive, lots of hands-on application and workshopping. And then, when we’re not meeting monthly or quarterly, a liaison meets with them and works with them individually on their work plans.
What we’re finding is you can go to training all day long, but what really matters is, How do you do this work?
It’s helpful knowing that you’ve got someone to help you think things through, because we’re culture changing. That’s tough work, and it doesn’t happen overnight. They’ve been doing it together and knowing they’re not alone. The curiosity they have, the willingness to try, in the context of our faith, has been lovely.
F&L: Are you primarily focused on the clergy or the laity in the congregations?
RB: It’s both. What we’re finding is we need to have leadership buy-in and support. But what we’re also finding is that clergy leadership doesn’t always want to be the one. What we’re doing is we’re helping build capacity and support around them so they’re not always the person that people go to.
More importantly, this is all about going upstream before a crisis, where it’s just sitting by someone in a pew and realizing they’re having an upside-down day, and it’s being able to listen differently and have conversations differently, so that we don’t wait three months for a crisis to erupt.
It’s fellowship. It’s companionship. What the clergy are telling us is, I can’t do it all anymore.
F&L: Are you imagining that this would take the place of therapy?
RB: It’s not to replace therapy, but it’s providing another tool in the toolbox to begin to have different conversations.
One of the intervention models that we’re using is an evidence-based practice called EMPOWER, based on research in India. Harvard Medical School trained a group of ASHAs [Accredited Social Health Activists], who are community health workers in India, on how to deliver behavioral activation, which is a brief psychosocial intervention.
They prove that you can train nonclinicians to deliver in nonclinical settings as effectively as clinicians, if not better. We’re using EMPOWER, and we’re training our lay leaders, our navigators, in behavioral activation.
Behavioral activation helps you to lean into what you value, and oftentimes we value our faith.
This is an opportunity for us to begin to create some referral pathways so that the person can be seen by the right person at the right time and at the right place. Because what often happens now — this is part of the culture building — is we immediately jump into a state of crisis, or we immediately jump to a therapist.
Currently, there’s no in-between. EMPOWER is just creating an alternative pathway. So it’s not to replace therapy, but it’s adding another access point or tool.
F&L: What were the biggest takeaways when you tried out the concept in real life?
RB: Language matters. Not a lexicon but translating science-based, secular-based interventions into faith community language is important. People have to see themselves in the work.
Going back to what you asked me earlier, our Scripture is rich in text to be able to do that. That’s been key — translating this work so that it means something in the context of our faith traditions and what we’re called to do as Christians.
F&L: What’s an example of that?
RB: It’s Easter season; it’s the Eucharist; it’s the resurrection. Those are part of our tool set. People connect to it.
We rotate meetings to the different churches. Each congregation hosts, and part of that is a worship service, and they specifically pull out Scripture readings in the context of this work.
We’re constantly trying to model the work and the context of who we are. It’s as easy as a testimonial from the pulpit or the starting of a small Bible study with a Scripture reading that alludes to or leans into the work — the Psalms or Mark.
F&L: You said earlier that you are working on changing the culture. How are you supporting that?
RB: We had a navigator meeting, and I remember it struck me: They’re going through change management. The conversations they were having were about change management.
And so we brought in corporate leaders and some nonprofit leaders that had gone through a culture transformation within their own institutions and organizations. We had a panel discussion, and we had them talk about their journey of rebuilding culture and change management within the structure of their institutions.
It was a powerful opportunity for learning, because part of what’s been so incredible is the churches and congregations realizing they’re not alone in this work. I wouldn’t have articulated that as what we’re trying to do by bringing people together, but I think that’s been part of the beauty, the relationships they’ve formed.
I had somebody say, “In a million years, I never would’ve thought that I would’ve sat across from a Lutheran pastor or priest. Never in a million years.” We have conservative Lutheran and more liberal Lutheran together. We’ve got the United Methodist Church. It’s been really dynamic.
F&L: What’s next for the project?
RB: We created a kind of workbook called “Finding the Way.” It’s a work in progress; we’re workshopping it now with our congregations and even churches outside of San Antonio.
It’s a series of readiness assessments. There’s a scale: If you score an A, B, C or D, it doesn’t just stop there. If you want to go to B, how do you do that?
The idea is helping so communities don’t have to start from scratch: If you’re going to choose a navigator, what are the characteristics or attributes a navigator needs to have? If you’re choosing a ministry team to work with, how do you identify people within your congregation?
F&L: What’s next?
RB: We’re using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and Human Flourishing Measure out of Harvard to demonstrate over time that congregations that are equipped to do this work can demonstrate that there is a change in the overall mental well-being of people in community.
My hope is that we can demonstrate that value and then be able to create some strategies around the sustainability of the work.
I want to show that churches can — and do — play a critical role in delivering mental health support within the community. They hold an important piece of the broader system, and their contribution has real significance for the well-being of the communities they serve.
