The Rev. Dr. David S. Fischler was born October 14, 1958 in East Orange, New Jersey. He grew up in a Jewish home, becoming a Christian during his freshman year in college. He lived in various places in northern New Jersey, but calls Parsippany home, since it was from Parsippany High School that he was graduated in 1976.

After a semester at Old Dominion University (where he met the
former Maryanne Surrells, then a junior), he transferred to Rutgers University, from which he graduated in 1980 with a B.A. degree in Political Science. Upon his graduation from college, he and Maryanne were married in Portsmouth, Virginia on June 21, 1980. They then moved to North Carolina, where David attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, graduating in 1983 with a Master of Divinity degree.

In part because of their non-Christian backgrounds, David and
Maryanne have had rather varied denominational experiences. They spent nine years serving in United Methodist churches, followed by fourteen years in congregations of the Moravian Church in America. In 2006, they moved to northern Virginia to plant a daughter congregation for Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Alexandria. Following the close of the church plant at the end of 2011, David became associate pastor at Faith, from which he comes to First EPC, Anna.

The congregation of First EPC Anna, voted on April 23, 2017 to extend a call to David and Maryanne.

David and Maryanne are the proud parents of one child, Rebecca, who was born on August 29, 1981 in Raleigh, N.C. Rebecca is a communications specialist with the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

In his leisure time, David is an avid chess player (he won the 1993 U.S. Championship in his rating class), a voracious reader of science fiction, a student of politics, an amateur genealogist, and a player of the autoharp.

He is also a baseball fanatic whose knowledge of the game’s history and statistics sometimes worries his wife, who can’t understand why he knows the last player to win the Triple Crown in the National League (Joe Medwick, 1937, with the St. Louis Cardinals) but can’t remember to unload the dishwasher.

For her part, Maryanne loves making homemade greeting cards (she led a card-making ministry at Faith that is known and appreciated by EPC missionaries around the world) and teaching children, is a student of American history, and shares David's passion for baseball, especially all things Atlanta Braves.