Grace Runkle didn’t know she could sing until God, apparently, decided otherwise.
She was a sophomore at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, helping run a worship night, when someone asked her to step up to the mic. She’d mostly stopped singing by then — years of comparing herself to more talented musicians had done their work. But she said yes, started into a song called “Re-Surrender,” and then something happened she still can’t explain.
“I opened my mouth to sing,” Runkle says. “And in that moment, I could sing.”
The notes were there. She fell to her knees, tears in her eyes, and when the song ended, her intern leaders walked up with a question she already knew the answer to: What just happened?
“I was like, I didn’t know I could sing,” she says.
Everything else follows from that night. The 23-year-old has spent the last two years building something that still doesn’t have many obvious peers in Christian music — indie-pop that draws from the same sonic world as Backseat Lovers and The Japanese House, rooted in faith but not tethered to the CCM ecosystem.
“I don’t even really like the term Christian music,” she says. “I want to say I’m a Christian and I make music.”
She grew up in a Christian home but describes her early faith as largely performative — obeying God because she wanted people to like her, running on appearances, quietly carrying things she didn’t want anyone to see.
“I wanted people to like me, and so I obeyed God,” Runkle says. “But I was living in so much hidden sin behind the scenes.”
The reckoning came at the end of her freshman year. She gave her life fully to Christ, started helping run campus ministry and, eventually, had that night at the microphone. Songs she’d been quietly writing started to feel like something worth finishing. She picked up a guitar, found a producer, put out “Captivated.” It did better than expected. Then she stepped away entirely — she’d already committed her summer to a mission organization — and spent months asking God what she was actually supposed to be doing.
She came back in 2025 with an answer.
“I felt the permission from the Lord to go all in,” she says.
She’d majored in business administration and Christian leadership at Liberty, nothing music-related, and it shows in how she thinks about the gap she’s trying to fill. She’d discovered indie music her freshman year — Backseat Lovers, Declan McKenna — and it cracked something open in her. She wasn’t hearing anything like it in Christian spaces.
“Why are there not Christian songs that I actually want to listen to?” Runkle says.
Her music isn’t devotional in the traditional sense. It goes where mainstream pop already goes — relationships, heartbreak, fear, who you’re becoming. She wrote most of her upcoming album while learning, for the first time, to actually feel things instead of numb them.
“If I actually want to heal from those broken places and allow God to transform me in them,” she says, “then I have to be honest and real with Him.”
The album, expected this fall, runs on that honesty. “Complaints I have about men. Hopes I have about the future,” she says, laughing. “Things I’ve learned looking back on the past years of Grace and who she’s growing up to be.”
She’s also trying to break something open for other women.
The Christian indie space is male-dominated in a specific, structural way — not hostile, just built around proximity. The guys in her orbit move in together, tour together, make music in the same room. She can’t do that.
“It’s been honestly kind of lonely,” Runkle says.
Nashville, where she’s relocating later this year, is partly a practical fix. More women in her lane, more artists in the same season. But she also wants to be the person who builds what she didn’t have — mentoring other young women, showing them the lane exists.
“I’m hopeful that what I do inspires other women to do it as well,” she says. “Because we can.”
A tour support slot for an as-yet-unannounced Christian band, a possible solo run at year’s end, a UK trip to record and lead worship sets — the next 12 months are full. She talks about all of it the way she talks about everything: no mapped-out strategy, just movement.
“I literally have no clue what I’m doing,” she says. “But if I can do it, then anyone can pursue the dream in their heart that God’s given them.”
