Michelle Snyder is executive director of Soul Shop, an organization that equips faith leaders and congregations to minister to people impacted by suicide.
What’s the history of Soul Shop?
It was started in the ’90s by Fe Anam Avis, a Presbyterian pastor at a large church in a small town in Ohio. In one six-month period there were three suicides in the community. Fe received secular training in suicide prevention, and he describes it this way: “I’d go all over southern Ohio doing these trainings, and we’d fill fire halls and community centers and auditoriums with 100 people—first responders, health-care workers, educators—and I’d look around and there would not be a clergyperson in the room.” He said that happened so often that he started to ask himself, What is it about how we’re having this conversation that isn’t capturing the theological imagination of the church? How can we think differently about that to help faith communities realize that this is their work?
Fe and I are friends, and when he asked me to take over his “retirement project,” there were 90 host sites for our workshops. Twelve years later, we have 70 trainers in the United States and 30 in West Africa. We have translated and modified what we do for different contexts: a youth worker version, a campus ministry version, a Black church version, a Hispanic church version. We’re working on a Korean one now and one for Native American communities. Our trainers come from all theological stripes, and we make it clear that we have no conviction other than that we want to save lives from suicide.
