Grace and Peace Studio is the working ministry of Marc Bulandr. The work is rooted in a long arc of life experience, faith, music, and presence in the rooms where people are being asked to carry hard things.
Marc was born in Berwyn, Illinois, the second of two boys in a Czech-American household. His father died when he was nine. What followed was not quiet grief in a stable home. It was the harder thing. Growing up in a house where pain was not named, and learning early that the people closest to you can fail to hold what matters most.
That is the year the faith journey began. Not by formal decision. By the kind of need a child carries when the world has rearranged itself and there is no language for what just happened. Faith arrived as something Marc reached toward, rather than something taught.
The formal naming came on a specific date. May 6, 1982. His fifteenth birthday. Baptism at Riverside Presbyterian Church in Riverside, Illinois. By sixteen he was ordained a Deacon there, the youngest in the congregation’s history at that time. He did not fully understand what he was being given. The congregation trusted him with something before he had earned it, and the weight of that trust shaped how he has understood ministry ever since. As something received before it is exercised, not the other way around.
Marc earned a BS and MS in Sociology from Illinois State University. The master’s thesis required over a hundred hours of ride-along observation studying police-citizen encounters during routine traffic stops. He is a sociologist by training, which means he understands how culture works, how cultural difference operates, and how institutions can fail the people they are meant to serve. That training is part of what makes the studio open. Marc does not work in labels. He works with people.
He married Jennifer, his partner since youth. They lost their first child, Noah, to anencephaly. There is no clean way to say what that means. The faith that survived that season is a different faith than the one that entered it. Three living children followed. Haley, Jacob, and Joshua. Joshua experienced an in utero stroke and has grown into a young man of remarkable resilience. Raising children through those years taught Marc more about grace than any text he has read.
Three decades in enterprise technology came next. Building teams, closing significant deals, eventually founding a company called Qualividence, a multi-model AI triangulation system applied to clinical trial design. In 2018 a professional crisis of significant magnitude forced a reckoning he had long deferred. He came through it the way he has always come through. By returning to the same place. A table, a congregation, and a faith he could not explain and could not abandon.
The pastoral instinct has shown up in a lot of places over a lot of years. Marc has coached youth football for four seasons, including one where he coached a team his own son was not on because the kids needed someone. Former players who are adults now still call him Coach. He has been a certified mentor inside a global enterprise, where for years his job was to invest in the growth of other people. He has ridden a motorcycle into the homeless neighborhoods of Chicago alone, with a Bible, sat with people that institutions had forgotten, prayed with them, and brought food and socks. He organized nothing. He just went.
He has visited memory care facilities and eldercare homes on his own, bringing his guitar, singing for people who had no other visitors, sitting with them. He has officiated weddings, including his own son Jacob’s wedding to Darcey, ordained through the Universal Life Church for that purpose, where he wrote the liturgy himself and included a remembrance of family members from both sides who had died, so the living could feel them in the room. He has sung graveside at a friend’s funeral when the family asked. He has prayed with strangers in airports and over bar tops and at restaurant tables.
For more than twenty-six years Marc has also owned a cabin in the Driftless region along the Mississippi River. For more than a decade he has been a member of a small congregation there and has led worship when the congregation needed it. He funded significant building repairs when they were needed. For several years he showed up to the local tractor pull with food and drink for the whole community, donating the full cost so every dollar the men’s group raised went directly to charity. He was not performing ministry. He was part of a community, and this is what you do for a community you belong to.
He hosts a podcast called Marc My Words. He has read the Bible cover to cover twice. He begins each day in scripture and reflection, working through multiple reading plans at once, letting the readings shape the day before the noise of the day shapes him. The discipline began decades ago and continues every morning.
None of this is a list of credentials. It is the shape of a life that has been pulling toward this work for a long time.
Grace and Peace Studio is the visible form of what has been forming for a long time. The work has been happening in private rooms and small congregations and on motorcycles and in memory care hallways for years. The studio is not a new direction. It is what the calling has been pulling toward all along.
Marc is a sociologist by training, a musician by practice, and a minister by formation. The studio brings the ministry and the music together under one roof. Marc has been shaped by many faiths since youth. Christian foundation. Exposure to and respect for traditions across the world's religions. A sociologist's understanding that culture and cultural difference matter, and that no one tradition holds a monopoly on truth or on the questions worth asking. The studio is fully open. All are welcome. People from every tradition and from no tradition at all. Marc does not cut down other faiths. He respects what other people carry. What he brings is the Word of God and Jesus in a non-performative way, in language people can recognize, in rooms where they can turn toward something true.
Grace and Peace.