No Steeple Required: Bishop Kara Wagner Sherer on Reckoning, Repair, and Revolutionary Love

When Kara Wagner Sherer became the first woman bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester in 2024, she made history. But if you ask her, she'd say she's more interested in making meaning. The kind that refuses easy answers. The kind that confronts injustice, tells the whole story, and invites the Church to be more than a building, especially in a city where the ghosts of slavery, segregation, and displacement still speak.

The Very Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer was elected the first female and ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester in Western New York on Feb. 24, 2024. Photo: Diocese of Rochester

I first heard Bishop Kara on WXXI’s Connections. Her voice was calm, curious, and charged with moral clarity. She spoke of Jesus not just as a savior, but as a liberator rooted in solidarity with the poor, the outcast, and the politically abandoned. She made it sound like love was not only a spiritual concept, but a daily political practice. I left that radio hour deeply moved. And I wasn’t the only one.

When we met in person at the Episcopal diocesan office on East Henrietta Road, I found that same calm presence. Midwestern warmth met urban edge. She smiled widely, spoke plainly, and listened fully. Kara, who spent years in New York City and Chicago, now leads a flock across eight counties in Western New York. Her work spans urban congregations in Rochester to rural parishes miles away, many of them reckoning with the role the Church has played in both healing and harm.

Our conversation began where another article of mine ended—at Two Saints Church, the oldest Episcopal congregation in Rochester. It was there I stumbled upon a startling historical claim: that its basement once housed part of the Underground Railroad. Though the accuracy of that claim remains debated, what’s not in doubt is the plaque on the wall upstairs honoring Nathaniel Rochester, the city’s namesake, and a known slaveholder.

Before moving north, Rochester enslaved people in Maryland and North Carolina. Even after New York began gradual emancipation in 1799, he used indenture contracts to prolong Black servitude. And like many white men of his time, he profited from land grabs at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee.

The Episcopal Church, too, has its entanglements with slavery and settler colonialism. I asked Bishop Kara: Isn’t it time we told that truth, fully and publicly?

Her answer was thoughtful and direct. “A church is not a museum,” she said, “but I understand the need to look at our history and to tell the truth about our past.”

This wasn’t a deflection—it was an invitation. What would it look like for a Rochester congregation to create a permanent exhibit on the Church’s complicity in slavery and displacement? I posed that to her.

She acknowledged that responses would be mixed: “Some would see it as an opportunity to engage. Some would be resistant. Some indifferent.” In that, she sees a reflection of the broader Church—a body divided on race, memory, and the politics of repair.

We shifted to talking about Rochester more broadly, its patterns of redlining, its segregated neighborhoods, and its slow and painful reckoning with inequality. Kara noted the parallels with Chicago, where she had long served. “It’s the same story,” she said. “Just on a different scale.”

Then she said something that stuck with me: “Like with Obama’s presidency, many liberals want to believe racism is over. I sense a version of that here. That because Rochester was home to Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, we’ve ‘arrived.’ But we haven’t. There’s still so much work to do.”

That work, she says, is both spiritual and structural.

We spoke, too, about immigration justice and the silent courage of congregants offering sanctuary to those at risk of deportation. Kara recounted a quiet prayer vigil held at the Border Patrol station on Pattonwood Drive. “Not a protest,” she clarified. “A vigil. A way to honor the humanity of everyone involved: migrants, activists, even agents carrying out policies they may not believe in.” She applauded the local media for its coverage but reminded me: “Some of this work has to happen under the radar now. For everyone’s safety.”

It was in those moments, those blurry spaces between law, love, and loyalty, that Kara’s theology shone brightest.

“We don’t presume to know the mind of God,” she said. “We come to know God through each other, through bread and wine, through truth told in community.”

So what does “being Church” look like in a city haunted by past and present injustice?

“It looks like people being fed, housed, visited, and loved.”

It’s not about full pews on Sunday. It’s about full bellies on Monday. It’s about showing up at the food pantry, the shelter, the courtroom, or the sidewalk outside the jail. It’s about asking hard questions and staying for the hard answers.

Kara’s vision is a faith that walks with the grieving, with the oppressed, with the truth. Even when that truth implicates us.

The Church, she says, does not exist to serve itself. It exists to serve the world.

As I left our meeting, I kept thinking about her steady gaze, her refusal to dodge discomfort, and her willingness to ask: Who are we really honoring? What history are we hiding? And what if holiness lives not in the steeple, but in the streets?

Bishop Kara Wagner Sherer is not here to soothe Rochester’s conscience. She’s here to awaken it.