About me
Marshall Isler was born in Kinston, NC in 1939 and grew up in the AMEZ church. After marriage to his college sweetheart and graduating from college in the early 60’s, he became a Lutheran. In the late 90’s He moved to Fayetteville and joined an evangelical church. Isler has had over sixty years of personal experience as an active Christian man; participating in many men’s groups in the churches he attended.
This includes seven years of recent experience leading the “Brother’s Keepers”, a local men’s Bible study group of about 20 men; a 20 Year relationship with the men of the Golden Group, consisting of about 10 to 15 men who were 50 to 80 years old, who met for monthly for breakfast, and again with wives at a member’s home; and more recently, participating in JBUM “Just Between Us Men”, a Wednesday evening men’s Bible study at a local church. Marshall and his second wife, Verna, presently reside in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He is a retired navy Commander, and holds a BS degree in Engineering from Howard University, and a Master’s degree from George Washington University. He is a graduate of the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School. He has also been a Congressional Fellow and a HUD Community Builder Fellow.
After foregoing a civil service super-grade at 38, Marshall joined Parametric, which at the time was the largest black owned construction management firm in the country. In addition to being its President, he led the development and ownership of a 17 million dollar parking and retail complex in downtown Philadelphia. This was his entry into the world of entrepreneurship, only to find that others expected him to stay in that “place” Jim Crow had defined for him and his contemporaries, during that time of racial history in America. This led to 45 years as a real estate developer, pioneering the use of public/private financing for affordable housing, and downtown redevelopment; finding God’s purpose and “place”, and not accepting that assigned to him by the culture of the day. Follow Marshall in his first book An Unwitting Pioneer, as he breaks boundaries, blazes trails as a black businessman, and finds God and purpose in his wilderness experience. Follow Marshall as he explores and shares his spiritual struggles in his second book, Masculinity’s Last Frontier.