Although on a typical day, food service employee Shannon Mileski can be found in main cafeteria, in her free time, it would not be unusual to see her working with her husband on developing a Baptist congregation.

The congregation Mileski and her husband are starting is called the Connection Church. They are renting space from the Carmel French Church on Saturday nights. According to Mileski, she sees each day as “God’s day” rather than her own day, and she sees each new opportunity as an opportunity God has given her.

“When you start a church obviously you don’t have a building and you don’t have people yet so you have to get everything. We are very fortunate that they are letting us rent their building,” Mileski said.

Mileski has been preparing to establish a church for seven years. Mileski and her husband were part of a church unit in Cleveland for a year. Then her husband was a pastor for two years, which allowed him to gain experience in teaching and ministering the congregation.

“It’s a misunderstanding of what it means when you are starting a church,” Mileski said. “I mean you start with nothing so the concept of that is hard to grasp because everybody thinks church is an established building with programs and all churches have started with nothing.”

The greatest struggle for Mileski while establishing the church is that since the organization does not have programs already in place, it’s hard to get people to be part of it. According to Mileski, people feel like it’s not reputable, causing them to be reluctant to join her new church.

“Don’t be scared to try to be part of a church that’s just starting from the ground up,” Mileski said. “Everything starts from scratch somewhere, and I would just say don’t shy away just because there is work to be done.”