Editor’s Note: This article addresses the topic of suicide. Reader discretion is advised.
It’s Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023, the opening weekend of the NFL season, and the New York Giants are hosting the Dallas Cowboys. At the two-minute warning before halftime, the jumbotron in the stadium lights up with a one-minute video montage of past and present NFL quarterbacks, including Peyton Manning, Dak Prescott, Steve Young and Russell Wilson, all sharing a simple but impassioned message: Stay here.
Interspersed throughout the video, a 40-second digital clock counts down to drive home the fact that every 40 seconds someone dies by suicide.
The video is playing on this particular date because Sept. 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day. Watching alongside the other fans in the stadium is Jacob Coyne, co-founder of Stay Here, a suicide prevention and mental health organization he leads with his brother Jonah. This video is the culmination of months of planning and years of God refining the brothers through sorrow and struggle to help eradicate suicide.
Never the Same
Jacob (31) and Jonah (28) Coyne grew up in the church at Life Center Tacoma in Tacoma, Washington, but admit they didn’t take their faith seriously. Their parents were experiencing marital trouble, Jacob was struggling with shame and suicidal ideation, and Jonah was wrestling with deep-seated fear.
Then their father Chad started attending a men’s Bible study to see if it could help him salvage his marriage. The brothers remember this clearly—they were together in the basement when their dad came home from the study, smiling. Something about him was radically different, something they would come to understand was an encounter with God.
“You could almost feel it. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the presence of God,” Jonah remembers. “Dad walked into the room, and it was just like, Whoa, our whole downstairs feels different. And I think Jacob started crying, and I started having a nervous laugh like, ‘What happened to you, Dad?’”
The next week both boys accompanied their dad to the Bible study and were themselves radically transformed by and filled with the Holy Spirit.
“The Holy Spirit changed my whole world. And I’ve never been the same since,” Jonah says.
Years later, the brothers would both become youth pastors with a shared desire to reach others dealing with the same fears, anxieties, doubts, depression and suicidal thoughts they had experienced. And their faith would be needed more than they could imagine.
Help Resources
- Suicide & Crisis Lifeline—Dial or text 988, or go to 988Lifeline.org.
- StayHere.live/churchresources
- TheHopeLine.com/chat-live/
- StayHere.live/freetherapy offers one free month of therapy.
Need to Know
- Annually, 50,000 people in the U.S. take their own lives. (CDC)
- Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults ages 10–34. (CDC)
- 32% of churchgoers report a close acquaintance or family member has died by suicide. (Lifeway Research)
- 80% of pastors say their church is equipped to assist someone who is threatening to take their own life. (Lifeway Research)
- 4% of churchgoers who have lost a loved one to suicide say church leaders were aware of their loved one’s struggles. (Lifeway Research)
Gone Too Soon
After the brothers’ parents eventually divorced, their uncle Greg became another father figure and mentor for them. He was an outgoing Christian, but six years into a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, he began to change and become more paranoid. Jacob was working as a youth pastor when he received the call that his uncle had killed himself.
“When he took his life, that broke my heart, and it really broke our family in many ways,” Jacob says.
The juxtaposition of Greg’s death and the loss of two students in his youth ministry to suicide in the same season planted a holy fury in Jacob. Surrounded by senseless loss, he was convinced something had to be done, but didn’t yet know what that “something” was.
For his part, Jonah experienced a crushing grief and anxiety in the wake of his uncle’s passing. In October 2015, at age 20, he became the youth pastor at EastPointe Church in Puyallup, Washington. Looking back, he describes it as the hardest season of his life. The previous youth pastors, Josh and Vanessa Ellis, had died when a large section of concrete fell from an overpass onto their car. Jonah not only was dealing with his own grief, but he also was ministering to a grieving youth group. By the time he turned 22, he felt burned out and was asking, Has Jesus left me?
Fortunately, Jonah reached out to a counselor who taught him how to grieve properly, and he has been on a healing journey ever since.
“I think for Jacob and me both, the Lord is using our pain for purpose. And he’s taken what was really a tragedy and wants to turn it into something beautiful,” Jonah says. “It could be really easy for me to just throw in the towel, and let this crush me and let all of these obstacles get in my way. But I feel like the Lord has said, No, I’m going use your story to save hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Through the Darkness
In March 2017, the first season of 13 Reasons Why released on Netflix. The show, based on the same-titled book by Jay Asher, follows a high school student who receives a box of cassette tapes detailing the reasons why a classmate died by suicide. In response, Jacob and Jonah began to brainstorm a ministry where they would visit high schools across America and speak on “14 Reasons Why Not” to give students a reason to not give up.
Then, in June 2018, Jacob experienced his own dark night of the soul. Within a month’s time, his wife Mariah had a miscarriage; he witnessed his stepbrother Tucker die of an accidental overdose in his stepfather’s arms; and the pastor at Life Center Tacoma, where Jacob served, was removed for sexual misconduct, tearing the church apart.
Overwhelmed, Jacob could barely function. The first time he went to see a counselor, he immediately started weeping out of grief and shame over being a pastor who needed counseling. Through the support of Mariah and his counselor, he had started on the road to recovery when the other shoe dropped. Jarrid Wilson, a vocal mental health advocate and associate pastor of Harvest Church in Riverside, California, took his own life. Wilson had been a friend and mentor to Jacob, even writing the foreword for Jacob’s first book Only Good News.
It was gut-wrenching enough when members of their youth group took their own lives, but when a pastor so passionate about mental health died by suicide, it was a wake-up call for both brothers. They made a commitment to do something about the suicide epidemic.
Stay Here
A month after Wilson died, Jacob watched a Louie Giglio sermon titled “I’m Not Okay … But Jesus Is” in which Giglio opened up about his own mental health struggles. The sermon ended with a refrain encouraging his congregation to stay, listing all the reasons why they should stay. Inspired, Jacob called Jonah and said, “What if we call our new ministry Stay Here.” They officially launched it as a nonprofit in 2020.
But after their first school assembly presentation, the pandemic struck. Discouraged, the brothers wondered how they would lead this ministry now that they couldn’t speak at schools. But because the number of Jacob’s TikTok followers had grown to 800,000, he decided to proclaim the gospel on social media and put in a few plugs for Stay Here.
The next turning point came when Jacob and Mariah attended a Next-Gen Summit leadership retreat hosted by YWAM in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. On the encouragement of a friend and ministry partner, Jacob attended, not as a social media influencer, but as the founder of Stay Here. One of the leaders saw something in Stay Here and rallied others to pray for Jacob and Mariah.
As they were praying, Jacob had a vision of prayer minister and preacher Lou Engle shouting, “Gen Z will be suicide free!” to a stadium full of Gen Zers who echoed it back to him. They then left the stadium and shouted it in high schools and colleges across America.
Jacob left that prayer gathering galvanized with a new vision and rallying cry for Stay Here: Gen Z will be suicide free. He called Jonah, and asked him to pray about quitting his job to help run Stay Here full-time.
“I think we could save a lot of people’s lives if we do this, and I need your help,” Jacob said.
Jonah hung up and told his wife Alexis, “He’s crazy. I don’t think that the Lord’s going to tell us to do that, but let’s pray.” So, he prayed, Lord, what do you think about what Jacob just said to me?
Immediately, Jonah had a vision of his uncle looking at him. “He said, ‘If you won’t do it for Jesus, will you do it for me?’ And behind my uncle was a boy in my youth ministry who killed himself. And then another boy—[the cousin of] a family that was going to my youth ministry—who took his own life. And they said, ‘Will you do it for us?’ And then all of these young people who had died by suicide—a sea of young people—and they said, ‘Where was Stay Here for us? We needed Stay Here. Will you do it for those that need it?’”
Moments later, Alexis saw Jonah sobbing.
“I don’t know what’s happening to you, but it looks like you probably got your answer,” she said.
Several months later, Jonah left his job as a youth pastor and went full-time with Stay Here.
A New Direction
As the brothers began making plans for the ministry’s future, they wondered how they were going to accomplish the lofty goal of eradicating suicide in an entire generation. The answer came in melding Jacob’s vision for Stay Here with online suicide prevention training, a crisis chat line, and counseling, leveraging his social media presence with branded apparel to broadcast the message.
We’re going let Gen Z preach this message in their schools because they’re in the schools, Jacob thought. So let’s train and equip Gen Z to reach Gen Z. Let’s train and equip churches to reach Gen Z.
Over the ensuing months, Jacob and Jonah developed online ACT (Ask, Convince, Take action) Suicide Prevention Training and offered it for free on the Stay Here website: StayHere.live. They sold T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Gen Z Will Be Suicide Free” in bold lettering. They shared their vision with church leaders and influencers to get the message out. The ministry got so much traction and enough donations in that first year of renewed vision that Jonah says God blessed his family financially more than when they were youth pastors.
“I don’t think we really do a good job talking about depression, anxiety and suicide [in the church]. We want to teach people how to have a conversation with someone who says, ‘I’m suicidal,’ instead of going like, ‘Well, we’ll just pray that away,’ or even worse, ‘You have a demon of suicide. Let’s pray that away,’” Jonah says. “We need to have conversations with people and listen to their stories.”
Nicolle’s Story
July 13, 2022, is a day that Nicolle Belieny will never forget. It was the day after her mom’s birthday. While she usually loved birthdays, that day she just felt deeply alone. For the previous three years, she’d been struggling to deal with interpersonal conflict in her family, friends who were not life-giving, and her first boyfriend who cheated on her in 2020 and left her feeling unloved.
The day after her mom’s birthday, she decided to end her life. She didn’t want to do it, but she also didn’t want to continue to live with her pain. Before she did, she texted some friends that she loved them and waited for a response. When no response came, she decided to open TikTok. The first video she saw was of Jacob Coyne talking about how much God loves you. She burst into tears, and decided to listen to her music on shuffle. When the first song she heard was “Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury, she lost it, and decided not to go through with her plans.
“After that, I started praying, I was like I’m not going through with it. I want to live because I want to show people if the Lord can die for me, why can’t I [die to] my old self and have my new self renewed?” she says.
When she met Jacob for the first time a week later at a Gateway Church student conference, she told him, “You know you saved my life.”
In the months that followed, she dropped her bad friends, became a student leader at her church, shared her story with middle school and high school students, and helped many students who were considering suicide not to go through with it. On September 3, 2022, she was rebaptized.
Nicolle’s dad, D.J., had no idea she had been struggling so much. He felt like he’d been paying attention to her and her siblings and checking in with them, yet he missed something so big.
“Your kid might be looking 100% fine on the outside, but if you don’t have that connection with them where they’re able to open up [their dark secrets] to you, that’s a huge problem,” he says. “Just be someone who listens.”
QB United
In April 2023, the brothers attended an influencers event, and as he had many times before, Jacob casually shared with the group about Stay Here. In the room listening was Matt Hostetler, nephew of Super Bowl-winning quarterback Jeff Hostetler. Matt called his uncle and told him he needed to meet Jacob and hear about Stay Here.
Jeff, a generous philanthropist and committed Christian, was in search of a cause to rally around in order to do an awareness campaign with other NFL quarterbacks under a new charitable organization called QB United.
Jacob got on the phone with Matt and Jeff, and after Jeff heard about the ministry and the scope of the suicide crisis [see “Need to Know”], he said, “I didn’t know that suicide was this big of an issue. We have to do something about it. What do we do?”
Jacob had the idea for Jeff to reach out to his quarterback contacts to see if they would be willing to record a video message of them saying, “Stay here. You matter. We need you here. We want you here. Please stay.”
They initially hoped to get 10 quarterbacks to participate, but when Joe Namath said he was all in, Jeff was emboldened to ask even more. In the end, 57 past and present NFL quarterbacks signed on to film themselves. None of them asked for payment.
Over the next several months, Jacob and his team edited the videos together into a one-minute promo, and partnered with over 150 influencers to post it simultaneously four years to the day after pastor Jarrid Wilson took his life. To date, the video has been viewed over 300 million times.
To Save a Life
After working with Jacob full-time for a year to help get momentum behind the cause of Stay Here, Jonah returned to church ministry as central student pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas. He continues to speak on behalf of Stay Here on mental health awareness and has worked to build partnerships with churches like Gateway and Life.Church to give their leaders ACT Suicide Prevention Training.
To date, he and Jacob have trained over 22,000 people. Their goal is to train 1 million people and have 10,000 schools and 10,000 churches trained and partnering with Stay Here to give Gen Z students the mental health support they need.
Stay Here has representatives in Norway and Australia, and is developing a Spanish version of the training. In addition, since 2020, Jacob has been able to lead over 100,000 people to Christ through his speaking and social media ministries.
In the coming year, Stay Here has a further goal to get 1 million people each year to pledge to stay, and to create a coalition of mental health organizations and churches working together to offer resources such as free therapy and chat lines.
“We’re trying to raise an army of young people, pastors, coaches and teachers who know how to save a life when they spot the warning signs. That’s the only way we’re going to see suicide rates drop,” Jacob says. “It can’t be through one hero. We’ve got to raise up many, many heroes to carry this baton.”
Suicide Prevention
1. SEE—the warning signs.
2. ASK—Are you thinking about suicide?” or “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”
3. LISTEN—to their reasons for wanting to die and emphasize their reasons for wanting to live.
4. ASSIST—Call the police or refer the person to a friend or family member or suicide hotline.
Coming Full Circle
Both brothers have many stories of lives impacted by Stay Here. For example, this past summer, Jonah preached at a YWAM summer camp. A young man came up to him and asked, “Is it true that you had a vision of my brother and that’s the reason why you do Stay Here today?”
The boy’s name was Jax. His cousins were in Jonah’s youth group, and his brother was Gabe, the boy in Jonah’s vision who had taken his own life. Jax was the one who had found him.
“Yes, it’s true. I had a vision of your brother,” said Jonah. “I hadn’t met you, but I’ve been praying for you and your family for over a year.” Then he added, “Jax, I’m going to do something with you that’s going to be really hard, but I’m going to believe that Jesus is going to set you free right here.”
He asked Jax to revisit that tragic day in his mind, and guided him gently through the process of finding Jesus in that moment. Jonah recalls, “In this vision that Jax had, Jesus wrapped his arms around Gabe and wrapped his arms around Jax. And he looked at Jax and said, ‘It’s OK, I have him.’ And Jax started sobbing and laughing. And he said, ‘Jonah, I haven’t felt this much joy in a really long time.’”
Later at that camp, Jax rededicated his life to the Lord.
As for Jacob, his friend Jocelyn wore a Stay Here T-shirt to a Seattle Mariners baseball game. A teenage girl approached her and asked about the shirt. Jocelyn explained the message of Stay Here and shared the gospel.
“I was looking for a sign to live,” the girl said after Jocelyn had finished. “I was planning on killing myself tonight. This is my sign to live.”
It’s people like these who keep the brothers going as they pursue making Gen Z suicide free.
“I’m so grateful that we made that decision to do this,” Jacob says. “I know the names and faces of so many people who have chosen to stay. I know the dates that they were going to kill themselves. And they have chosen to stay because of this ministry. And I wonder, if we [hadn’t] pushed through the adversity, pushed through the discouragement, pushed through the fears, how many of those people would not be here?”