Our Team

Don Darius Butler has been serving in ministry for more than 25 years, dedicated to preaching, justice, and advocating for children.

He grew up in the Bahamas, shaped by Pentecostal, African Methodist, and Anglican traditions. He gave his life to Christ and was baptized at Mission Baptist Church in Nassau, where he first explored his calling and was later licensed and ordained for ministry.

Butler is a proud graduate of American Baptist College (summa cum laude), earned his Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University as a Kelly Miller Smith Scholar, and later completed his Doctor of Ministry at Duke University. He also trained in chaplaincy through Clinical Pastoral Education at Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Kentucky.

From 2009 to 2019, he pastored Tabernacle Community Baptist Church in Milwaukee, where he guided impactful ministries like a citywide gun buyback program that removed over 300 weapons from circulation and opened the church as a space for healing and dialogue around gun violence. In 2016, his leadership helped spark a national conversation when the congregation hosted a forum with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and mothers who had lost children to gun violence.

From 2019 to 2024, he served as pastor of First Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville, Alabama. There he championed children and youth, expanded missions, and spoke out for racial justice across the region.

Beyond the pulpit, Butler has served on local and national boards, including his role as Chair of the Children’s Defense Fund Board of Directors. He has worked as a chaplain with both the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office and the Huntsville Police Department, and he continues to support global missions, leading trips to Haiti, Malawi, South Africa, and the Bahamas. His ministry and scholarship have been widely recognized. In 2016, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers at Morehouse College, and in 2018, into the Martin Luther King Jr. College of Pastoral Leadership. His writings are published in The African American Pulpit, The African American Lectionary, and Walk Together Children: Black and Womanist Theologies, Church, and Theological Education.

Today, Butler is the founding pastor of The Concord Fellowship, a growing intergenerational Baptist church in Madison County, Alabama. He is married to Attorney La Keisha Wright Butler, and together they have two children, Dahlia and Don Jr.

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