Father Tom Kirkendoll, center, watches as Dennis Makokha makes his First Oath as a Glenmary missioner. Father Tom witnessed both Dennis's and Austine Duru's First Oath.

When Austine Duru and Dennis Makokha completed their —-an intense year of prayer and reflection—they took their First Oath to Glenmary, committing to becoming members of Glenmary and living lives of poverty, chastity, obedience and prayer. Father Tom Kirkendoll served as a witness for both men at their June 30 First Oath Mass and ceremony. “They’ll make great missioners,” he says.

And Father Tom should know. He lived with these new missioners while they were in the novitiate in Maple Mount, Ky., and was an integral part of their novitiate formation process. Throughout that process Father Tom shared stories and experiences from his own days in the missions. And, in return, both Dennis and Austine learned that “I’m someone they can talk with and share their own experiences,” he says.

Father Tom’s own vocation journey began as a fourth-grader in Milwaukee, Wis., when he first began thinking about priesthood. He credits the sisters who taught him in his inner-city community for instilling in him a missionary spirit. His high school guidance counselor helped him find a way to apply that spirit to missionary priesthood.

When he was a freshman at Pio Nono High School, his guidance counselor, Father Fresler, asked him about his plans for the future. “I want to be a missioner!” he recalls saying. “It just came out of my mouth and I thought ‘Where did that come from?’” But, he didn’t quite know how to be a missioner because, he says “foreign mission work didn’t really appeal to me.”

“Then Father Fresler pulled a copy of Glenmary Challenge out of his desk and told me about a missionary society that worked in the United States. He asked me to write a letter to Glenmary and told me he would mail it.”

One month later, Father Fresler asked about the letter. Father Tom told the priest that he really hadn’t given any further thought to it. After much hemming and hawing, Father Tom made his counselor a promise: “I’ll bring it.”

Another month passed. The same question, the same response.

“One more month passed, and Father Fesler asked me again,” Father Tom recalls. “By then I realized that I had been lying to a priest! I told him, ‘I’ll have it to you tomorrow.’” And he did.

Three weeks after his counselor mailed the letter of inquiry to Glenmary, Father Tom received a reply from Glenmary’s vocation director at the time, Father Frank Ruff. “Then I did a dumb thing,” Father Tom jests. “I wrote back, and he wrote me again!”

Their correspondence continued throughout Father Tom’s high school years, “Then two years after I graduated from high school, I joined this outfit,” Father Tom says. After his ordination in 1987, Father Tom served as the pastor of several Glenmary missions in Georgia, but a severe automobile accident in 1996 resulted in over two months of unconsciousness, and many more months of therapy.

Father Tom retains a great sense of humor, even about his accident. “During the months that I was unconscious, the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl—and I missed it!” the Wisconsin native laments.

Because of his personality, he believes he’s “someone the guys can share with, and I lighten the house and bring some levity. I don’t think you have to be serious all the time!”

In living with the novices and sharing in their formation, Father Tom lives a ministry of presence. “The novices see me as a priest struggling to make it,” he says. "But they also see that whatever the struggles are, I’m not going to give up.”