Grace and Peace Studio is my working ministry. 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. Here is how I got here.
The studio is not denominational. It is grounded in scripture and the witness of Christ, not in any one tradition, and it is open to anyone anywhere who is asking, including those who are not sure they believe at all. Wherever you are on the journey, or even if you have never started one, you are welcome here.
I was born in Berwyn, Illinois, the second of two boys in a Czech-American household. My father died when I 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, learning early that the people closest to you can sometimes fail to hold what matters most.
That is the year my faith journey began. Not by any 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 I reached toward, rather than something I was taught.
The formal naming came on a specific date. May 6, 1982. My fifteenth birthday. I was baptized at Riverside Presbyterian Church in Riverside, Illinois. By sixteen I was ordained a Deacon there, the youngest in the congregation’s history at the time. I did not fully understand what I was being given. The congregation trusted me with something before I had earned it, and the weight of that trust shaped how I have understood ministry ever since. Something received before it is exercised, not the other way around.
I earned a BS and MS in Sociology from Illinois State University. My master’s thesis required over a hundred hours of ride-along observation studying police-citizen encounters during routine traffic stops. I am a sociologist by training, which means I understand 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. I do not work in labels. I work with people.
I married Jennifer, my partner since youth. We lost our 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. We have three living children. 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 me more about grace than any text I have read.
Three decades in enterprise technology came next. I built teams, closed significant deals, and eventually founded a healthcare data and AI company called Qualividence. The work uses qualitative intelligence and AI to give patients a stronger voice in their healthcare journey, and to use what they say to improve the experience itself. In 2018 a professional crisis of significant magnitude forced a reckoning I had long deferred. I came through it the way I have always come through. By returning to the same place. A table, a congregation, and a faith I could not explain and could not abandon.
The pastoral instinct has shown up in a lot of places over a lot of years. I coached youth football for four seasons, including one where I coached a team my own son was not on, because the kids needed someone. Some of those former players are adults now and they still call me Coach. I was a certified mentor inside a global enterprise for years, where my job was to invest in the growth of other people. I rode my motorcycle into the homeless neighborhoods of Chicago, alone, with a Bible, and sat with people that institutions had forgotten. I prayed with them and brought food and socks. I did not organize anything. I just went.
I have visited memory care facilities and eldercare homes on my own, bringing my guitar, singing for people who had no other visitors, sitting with them. I have officiated weddings, including my own son Jacob’s wedding to Darcey. I was ordained through the Universal Life Church for that purpose, and I wrote the liturgy myself. I included a remembrance of family members from both sides who had died, so the living could feel them in the room. I have sung graveside at a friend’s funeral when the family asked. I have prayed with strangers in airports and over bar tops and at restaurant tables.
I have owned a cabin in the Driftless region along the Mississippi River for more than twenty-six years. I have been a member of a small congregation there for over a decade, and I have led worship when the congregation needed it. I funded significant building repairs when they were needed. For several years I 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. I was not performing ministry. I was part of a community, and this is what you do for a community you belong to.
For more than two decades I have served on the boards of foundations supporting music education, youth, and veterans. Twenty-three years on the Illinois State University Foundation Board. Currently Fundraising Chair at Give A Note Foundation. The work is governance, not photo-op. It is the same instinct that runs through everything else here.
I host a podcast called Marc My Words, now in its second season after two years of free inspirations on LinkedIn. On Sundays, Marc My Sabbath gathers the seven days of readings into one homily, set against what is happening in the world, with music chosen to carry the weight. I have read the Bible cover to cover twice. I begin 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 me. 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.
I am 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. I have been shaped by many faiths since 1976. Christian foundation, deepened by exposure to and respect for traditions across the world’s religions, and grounded in 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. People from every tradition and from no tradition at all are welcome here. I do not cut down other faiths. I respect what other people carry. What I bring 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.