Karen P. Oliveto was born on Good Friday. At 11, she felt called to be a United Methodist pastor. By 16, the New York native had preached her first sermon. Within a decade, she had completed seminary and was serving a small dairy farming community in the Catskills, where she also drove the town ambulance (“I got to drive fast and was always present in the midst of a crisis”).
Two years ago, Oliveto was elected bishop of the denomination’s Mountain Sky Area, which includes Utah as well as Montana, Wyoming and Colorado.
Her elevation put the energetic, God-talking leader at the center of a brewing storm over the issue of homosexuality that had finally reached its apex.