Forbes was born in 1969 at the Patty A. Clay Hospital, a former Civil War field hospital in Richmond, Ky. At the age of 3, he moved to Bellbrook with his family. Despite being rendered legally blind following an optic nerve problem he experienced at birth, Forbes successfully completed his school work and even played basketball at Xenia Christian High School for two years before transferring to Temple Baptist High School in Dayton.
“I had to learn to grow and adapt to it,” Forbes said of his vision difficulties. “It took a lot more focus and it took more concentration. I didn’t get a reading machine until I was in college, so I struggled.”
After graduating from Temple High School in 1987, he attended Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky., but after one term found himself floundering, so he returned home and sought counsel from his minister, Mike Cassara, the former minister of Bethany Church of Christ in Kettering. Cassara advised Forbes to attend his alma mater, Kentucky Christian University.
“He told me to get to a Bible college and focus on what I wanted to do,” said Forbes, who met his wife, Rosa, at the beginning of his sophomore year.
“I got involved in traveling for the school with an outreach singing program called Destiny and Voices of Praise,” he said.
The oldest of five children, Rosa grew up in Rayland, Ohio, facing her own difficulties. A hard worker, who earned money as a waitress while in school, Rosa also watched her younger siblings and helped care for her dying father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who was 46 years old when he became ill.
“I had a lot of responsibility, but you do what you have to do,” said Rosa, whose father was a third-generation Pittsburgh steel worker. “It was an economically depressed area, but I was active in church. I had a sense of stability growing up there.”
The first in her family to attend college, Rosa was encouraged by her youth minister to attend Kentucky Christian College after she graduated from Buckeye South West High School in 1989.
The Forbes wed in 1991 and moved to Dayton where the Rosa worked as a supervisor at Olin Mills Portrait Studios, an employee of United Church Directories and a store designed for La-Z-Boy. In addition to raising the couple’s two daughters — Micaela, a student at Bellbrook Middle School and Madelyn, a second-grade student at Stephen Bell Elementary School — Rosa also graduated with honors from Miami Jacobs College and works side-by-side with her husband at Bellbrook Church of Christ.
After returning to Dayton, Forbes earned a degree in broadcasting and worked as a radio sports anchor and morning show producer, before returning to his roots in the church. In 2006, Forbes graduated with honors from Cincinnati Christian University. He began his ministry as an associate worship minister at a small church in Missouri before taking the position as interim pastor at Franklin Christian Church, followed by a position at Medway Christian Church and finally his current position as senior minister in Bellbrook.
Contact this columnist at (937) 432-9054 or jjbaer@aol.com.
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