A new Pitt program pairs biblical messages with the science of cognitive behavioral therapy

John Wallace Photo by Aimee Obidzinski

It is a warm morning in May, and the worshippers make their way into Bible Center Church in Pittsburgh's Homewood neighborhood. Pastor John Wallace, in his dark suit, stands at the front offering devotions. Sunday after Sunday, concerned about the congregation's well-being, he dispenses prayers and practical wisdom from the Bible, everything from tips on educating children to building generational wealth.

For all his life, Wallace has been deeply connected to this church, which took root in 1956 a few blocks over on Tioga Street in his grandfather's three-bedroom home. There, Elder Ralph and Mother Bernice Groce had a vision to nurture a place that fostered worship, education and community development, making a little patch of Homewood a little more like heaven.

Sunday after Sunday, Wallace came to this church, absorbing his grandparents' values of faith and community.

With their blessings, he went off to the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan to study sociology, exploring how faith-based institutions can uplift people just like those who came into his grandfather's church and eventually his own.

With a fist full of degrees, Wallace returned to his city of birth in 2004 and began to rise as a social work faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh. He focused on teaching and facilitating participatory research - then an emerging academic practice where the ivory tower partners with the grassroots to make research more meaningful. He taught classes in Homewood, guided doctoral students and launched entrepreneurial and housing developments in the neighborhood.

Today, Wallace is a senior pastor, an endowed professor and Pitt's vice provost for faculty diversity and development. Much of his effort through this trinity of roles has been aimed at addressing the whole person, both on campus and off. In recent years, he's become increasingly concerned about his congregation's and the community's mental health, believing that if he could transform minds and behavior, he could find ways to aid a community overstressed by economic decline and crime.

In 2019, funded by a Year of Community Engagement Award from the University, Wallace brought together Pitt scholars and local ministers to address mental health in Homewood, a primarily Black neighborhood. The project is called CHURCH or Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health.

It's designed to teach local faith leaders cognitive behavioral therapy so they can help parishioners who are struggling with their mental well-being.

The program aims to fight stigmas that bedevil the Black community and keep people from seeking treatment or even acknowledging psychological problems. Black adults in the United States are 20% more likely than their white counterparts to experience serious mental health issues, and young Black adults ages 18-25 experience both higher rates of psychological problems and lower rates of mental health treatment.

These stigmas, in part, were set in place by complicated historical and systematic barriers, says Wallace, and taken as a whole, "the mental health concerns of Black people are under-investigated and misunderstood."

Pastor William Glaze of Homewood's Bethany Baptist Church has operated a biblically centered counseling center for more than 20 years and is a founding CHURCH member.

He welcomed the opportunity to expand mental health outreach, believing that it aligned closely with Bethany's efforts.

"We're the best-kept secret in the city," he says of Bethany's biblical counseling ministry. "But I think that once we get the word out on this project, people will … come to counseling to be healed."

Treatment obstacles such as affordability and availability, Glaze adds, have caused mental health challenges to be "secreted" away, with many feeling they need to just keep it to themselves.

This is not helpful, he says. "If there is unaddressed trauma in the home, it can become a ground for bitterness, depression and abuse," exacerbating other mental health issues that might be present.

Aliya Durham, William Glaze and Deborah Moon Photo by Aimee Obidzinski

CHURCH seeks to tackle these challenges with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which helps people identify negative patterns of thinking to improve their affect and behavior. For instance, some people default to imagining that the worst will happen. CBT helps them to recognize that tendency and find new, more realistic ways to look at the situation. CBT can't fix every mental health issue, but it can help to preempt a spiral, says Deborah Moon, an assistant professor in Pitt's School of Social Work and the School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry.

"It is more preventative in nature," says Moon, an expert in trauma-focused CBT. Her research is informed by implementation science, which focuses on moving research from the lab or campus into the community.

"There are certain patterns of thinking that contribute to mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression," she says, "and if those patterns can be changed, it's possible to better manage mental health challenges."

CBT goes beyond the power of positive thinking: "It's about having more rational and balanced perspectives," she adds.

In developing the training program for pastors, the CHURCH team knew that incorporating spirituality was vital: "Because that's what many people lean on and are connected to," Moon says. Biblical teaching in Black churches surprisingly resembles CBT approaches, which makes it an excellent vehicle in which to integrate evidence-based mental health intervention techniques, says Moon.

For example, the first session of CHURCH's Renew Your Mind curriculum is drawn from Romans 12:2, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

"Spirituality is an important resource in terms of maintaining positive mental health, but not a lot of therapists integrate it into their mental health treatment," Moon says.

One of those working to emphasize this kind of integration is Aliya Durham, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work with expertise in community engagement and nonprofit management. A deacon in a Baptist church, Durham has worked in and with the Homewood community and stresses that another key to CHURCH's work is the local knowledge that the diverse ministers like Glaze bring to the table. As she helped the team to bond, Durham also worked to make sure there was equal appreciation for the scientific and the spiritual.

"It was important that we were grounded in language and saw each other as brothers and sisters," she says.

The team also sought to find ways to culturally tailor Renew Your Mind by using local church musicians to help incorporate worship music into the training, as song is central to spirituality within most Black churches.

According to Moon, a music therapist who has served Korean immigrant churches for many years, one of the many benefits of music therapy is that it enhances your memories. Music is experienced intellectually and emotionally, and it's the emotional connection that helps it stick.

CHURCH was launched four years ago and was finding its footing when COVID-19 struck and was soon followed by the murder of George Floyd. The physical isolation of a pandemic and the trauma of persistent racism took its fiercest cuts at African Americans, Wallace says. The fallout from these events only magnified the mental health concerns he was hoping to address.

In Homewood, ministers saw stressed essential workers, exhausted parents and an enormous strain on social networks as important life events like weddings and funerals moved online.

The CHURCH team, about a dozen Christian followers--including pastors, professors, social workers, musicians and a doctoral student--persisted, moving their collaborations online, all trusting that their work could bridge science and faith to help a hurting world.

In the years since, the faith leaders have been trained in using CBT and then helped to design the intervention. After having received the first joint funding offered by Pitt's Center for Race and Social Problems and The Center for Research on Innovations in Services and Equity in Mental Health, the project will expand and roll out into eight Homewood churches this summer.

Wallace hopes the partnerships and intervention can create a dialogue that opens up a discussion on difficult topics, finding resources and building networks of care.

It's all very exciting, says Wallace, and on a deeper dimension, it's all leading to not only a renewal of minds, but also a renewal of culture. "It's a way to bring the stigma of mental health in the Black community out of the shadows."

For Wallace, this is vital, restorative work. Much like the work that his grandfather prayed would create that little patch of heaven on earth. Sunday after Sunday, Wallace begins that work in Homewood.

Improving health in Homewood

The CHURCH program is just one way that Pitt is partnering with Homewood residents to make the community healthier. At the Homewood Community Engagement Center, pharmacists help people evaluate the medications, clinicians hold classes on diabetes management and researchers are studying the health benefits of African dance for older Black adults. Learn more at cec.pitt.edu.

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