The pathway to planting Pathway Church in Lafayette was only part of an incredible journey for the Rev. Ben Davis.
“It’s been the best and hardest 10 years of my life,” said Davis, who founded Pathway with his wife, Melanie, after spending 10 years at The Mission Church in Hammond. “It’s been awesome to see the church grow and see a community that started out of nothing grow together and form. … We always knew that church planting would not be easy.”
Davis, 44, had helped the interdenominational church get on solid ground before he experienced a few personal and church setbacks. He suffered a stroke seven years ago and then last year, a drunken driver caused severe damage to the church building that temporarily left members without a place to worship.
But God moved miraculously in both situations, Davis said.
“God healed me, and the church is so resilient,” he said.
Davis' debilitating stroke happened when he was just 37.
“I had the stroke about four years into the church. I lost the ability to speak,” he said. “God did a miracle. The doctors said I should be impaired and I should be dead.”
The stroke kept him out of church for six months, but Davis said it took about a year for him to fully recover.
“I fought with a lot of anxiety after that,” he said. “When something that big happens to your health, you get really fearful. Any kind of little headache or something weird, you feel like something’s happening to you all over again.”
It was during that season that Davis also found healing over his thoughts.
“God is a healer; that’s his nature,” Davis said. “For me, it was replacing the lies that I would hear in my mind with the truth that God had spoken over my heart, over my family and over our ministry. So it was literally retraining myself to take every thought captive.”
Pathway has had several homes in Lafayette since its founding. The church was at the Ambassador Caffery Parkway location when the car crashed into the side of the building about 2 a.m. on Feb. 12, 2023. In-person services were halted for about two months, but God soon opened the door for the church to purchase its current location at 200 Southcity Parkway.
“We have a vision to plant campuses all over Acadiana, so we prayed and God did a miracle and has given us an opportunity to bond,” Davis said. “God naturally placed us where he wanted us. It’s been clearly seeing God’s miracles all along the way.”
A native of Florida, Davis grew up in church in the Madisonville and Ponchatoula areas.
“I remember giving my life to Christ with my kindergarten teacher at 5 years old,” he said. “It started that walk with Christ. Then, I had moments along the way.”
Those moments that threatened to send Davis’ life down a divergent path came right before high school.
“I could have gone the wrong way,” he said. “I started to hang out with the wrong crowd, lying to my parents and those kinds of things.”
But an experience with God at a youth camp set Davis back on the right track. He even made the decision to leave his Christian school to attend a public high school.
“I went there mainly for the reason to help evangelize. I just wanted to see my friends and my school on fire for God,” he said.
Davis held to this faith through college at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, where he earned a business degree and then started touring as a drummer with the Christian band Mary’s Den.
However, he eventually found himself off the right path again.
“I went through a time of disillusionment like a lot of people do,” he said. “I love God, but if you’ve been raised in the church, you see the good, the bad, the ugly, all sides of it. I was a little disgruntled for probably six or seven years, not getting into organized religion.”
After the band disbanded, Davis was depressed and decided to reconnect with The Mission Church at 23 years old.
“That was really the turning point for me,” he said. “It was some years of healing and redirecting. I had the passions that had always been there for ministry, for the church, but I really didn’t know what to do with it.”
He found his calling in ministry.
“I was just reading the Scriptures and becoming convinced that the church was God’s plan to change the world,” he said. “That, coupled with the experience of being in a loving faith community where I’d seen it perfectly done in a healthy way propelled me to say I want to be a part of the solution and not just pointing the finger.”
He spent a 10-year process of healing, exploring his gifts and learning to preach under the leadership of Deven and Kathy Pedeaux at Mission Church and the Association of Related Churches. ARC is a network of churches that combine relational, leadership and financial resources to empower and start life-giving churches.
Davis said without the Pedeauxs and the relationships that he's formed through the ARC, he wouldn’t be doing what he's doing.
"God used them in a pivotal way. It really changed the trajectory of my life,” he said.
Davis served several roles at The Mission Church, including as assistant pastor, before feeling called at age 33 to launch a church in his wife’s hometown of Lafayette.
“We looked at a lot of different places but never felt a strong pull. Every time we’d pray about it, Lafayette would come back over and over. I knew God was calling us to this area,” he said.
The couple received confirmation from The Mission Church, moved to Lafayette in 2012 and held the first Pathway service on Sept. 15, 2013, at City Club in River Ranch.
One of the Scriptures that inspired the Pathway name was Psalms 16:11: “Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”
“My motto is 'Let’s change the world together.’ We’re here to dream big dreams and make a difference. That’s the pathway we like to introduce people to and take them on to find real life in Christ,” he said. “Often God doesn’t give you the whole picture. It’s a pathway. You take steps to get to the next step.”
Davis said God is big enough to get us where we need to be.
“You just got to keep moving. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. I just keep moving forward to the next step that God leads me to,” he said.
For more information, go to gopathwaychurch.com.