With the rise of social media, users of all ages and backgrounds have the opportunity to share content and connect with fans around the world.
Two students at
Grace College in Winona Lake, second-year student Abby Schank and first-year student Xander Sallows have garnered national followings for their Christian-themed work on the social media platform, TikTok.
Here’s how they are making a name for themselves as student artists.
Meet Abby Schank
When Schank joined TikTok two years ago, she didn't expect anything to come out of it. Two months later, however, two of her videos had more than 1 million views, and before she knew it, she had 15,000 followers.
“From then on, God started opening doors,” Schank says.
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An English major, Abby Schank, right, applies the power of storytelling to her videos to humorously retell Bible stories.
An
English major, she applies the power of storytelling to her videos to humorously retell Bible stories. She says that she seeks to stay true to the morals of the stories, but makes them entertaining to help social media users learn about the Bible.
“Growing up, I was always a little bored in church because it just seemed very serious, very by the book,” Schank says. “I thought I could make learning about the Bible a lot of fun.”
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An English major, Abby Schank applies the power of storytelling to her videos to humorously retell Bible stories.
Recently, she hit 200,000 followers on
TikTok and 40,000 on
Instagram, and she has done collaborations with stars, like John Luke Robertson of “Duck Dynasty.” Since the start of her TikTok career, Schank feels that she has grown in both her faith and confidence. When she was younger, she struggled with social anxiety and thought that she would never be able to escape it. Now, she’s created a career as a virtual “performer,” and she’s getting ready to publish a new book series.
She attributes this success to her Christian faith and following.
“God has really taken something that I thought would cripple me and made it my strength,” she says.
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Grace student, Abby Schank, left, collaborated with John Luke Robertson, right, of “Duck Dynasty.”
Meet Xander Sallows
Sallows has been using
Spotify to release his own music since September 2020. While his music is not limited to the Christian genre, he sees it as an expression of his faith and has found success in both Christian and non-Christian music circles.
“I was inspired by other artists and wanted to be able to impact people in the same way that they’ve impacted me,” Sallows says.
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Sallows has been using Spotify to release his own music since September 2020.
He oversees every step of the process himself, including producing, writing, singing, mixing, and recording his music. According to him, it takes between 100 and 200 hours to produce just one song. He started writing music his freshman year of high school, and he produced and recorded for 3.5 years before releasing music. Now, he is hired by other artists to help produce their songs.
As a creative, he says that he sometimes struggles to allow himself to be creative amidst the pressure of perfectionism.
“I question, would anyone want to listen to this?” Sallows says. “When I started, I had about 100 people listening every month, and now, I’ve had over 250,000 people listen. I never expected that.”
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Xander Sallows is a musician and a first-year student at Grace College.
In April, one of his songs hit the Christian charts for the first time.
“Right next to me were artists like Toby Mac and We are Messengers, and it didn’t really make sense,” Sallows says. “I knew it had to be the Lord at that point.”
Through his work on Spotify, Sallows was able to achieve his dream of making a song with the artist who inspired him to make music, Matthew Parker, who also just so happened to be Sallows’s most listened to artist on Spotify for five years in a row.
Parker drove from South Carolina to Sallows’s home in Michigan so the pair could co-write the song “Skydiving,” which is Sallows’ most popular song on Spotify. Sallows says that was one of the most impactful experiences of his music career.
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Sallows has been using Spotify to release his own music since September 2020.
Although he has always liked music, he never imagined he could turn it into a career. Now that he has found success on Spotify, he is pursuing a degree in
music production at Grace.
Most recently, Sallows released one song on Thanksgiving and three more as well as an EP on Dec. 3. He will have four more out on Dec. 31. His songs can be streamed on most music platforms.