About Mark Schultz
Faith and family values were an integral part of Schultz life growing up in Colby, Kansas. After graduating from Kansas State University, he moved to Nashville in 1994. “I became a professional waiter,” he says with a grin, recalling those early days of paying his dues in Music City.
During a particularly discouraging time as he was trying to get his career off the ground, his parents came to visit. Standing outside the famed Ryman Auditorium, his dad looked at Mark and told him he’d play there someday. At the time, Mark couldn’t even imagine it. He was serving as the youth director at Nashville’s First Presbyterian Church, and though kids and adults at his church loved his music, he didn’t know if his audience would ever extend beyond his church walls.
It soon did. With encouragement and help from his church family, Schultz rented out the Ryman Auditorium to put on a show. “Everybody at our church chipped in,” he recalls. “You had moms that were bringing the food and bringing the choir robes. I thought if I don’t sell this thing out, I’ll look like a big moron, but at least it was on my own terms and I wanted to do it. If I failed, I failed, but I would fail doing what I wanted to do.”
He didn’t fail. The auditorium filled with enthusiastic Mark Schultz fans. Record executives who had come to check him out were left standing up in the back because they couldn’t even get a seat. They loved what they saw and Schultz soon had a record deal.
So much has happened since then. In less than six short years, he’s become one of Christian music’s best-loved and most respected artists. His days as a “professional waiter” are long behind him. “Sometimes I’m really blown away that it’s 2006. My first record didn’t come out till 2000,” he says. “To have seven No. 1 radio singles, it’s been a cool thing. It’s been fun. When I walk out at a concert, I talk before I sing and it’s almost like I can feel the crowd breathe and we kind of come together. They feel that connection. I’ve had people say they felt like I was in their living room, playing songs and telling them stories.”
Information adapted from www.markschultzmusic.com