The Rev. Shariya Molegoda joined St. Andrew Episcopal Church, Madison, as rector in November, 2016, after serving as rector of Grace Church Church in Jefferson, Missouri, for nine years. Prior to that she served in a variety of positions in Massachusetts: interim rector at St. James’s church in Cambridge, priest-in-charge at the Church of St. Mary of the Harbor in Provincetown, associate rector at Christ Church, Harvard Square in Cambridge, assistant to the rector at St. Anne’s in the Fields in Lincoln, and pastoral associate at Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston. She received a Master of Divinity degree from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale in 1993, and spent her first five years after graduation as a sister and novice at the Society of St. Margaret in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a convent now located in Duxbury.
The Rev. Molegoda grew up in Sri Lanka, the large island country off the southeast coast of India, once known as Ceylon. Many of her family members live there, and she returns to visit every year.
Her early years in the United States were spent in Georgia. Shariya graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur in 1981 and did graduate work in forestry at the University of Georgia in Athens. She has a masters degree in environmental science from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka.
