Rev. Canon Dr Dennis Tongoi of Kenya travelled 160 days a year, led leaders across continents, and reached the top of his field. Then someone called him “rootless”, and he realised that almost every relationship he had was transactional. In this Story of Transformation, Dr Dennis shares what happened when he and a group of men he’d known for over 50 years sat down in a retreat and told each other their life stories for the first time. “I was really shocked. People I had been with for almost 50 years… I did not know them.” What formed out of that room was a deep commitment to each other: to finish well together, and to help each other thrive rather than merely survive. A group where, as Dennis puts it, “it is not what you do, it’s who you are.” This is a space where men share their deepest struggles without being judged, and without anyone trying to fix them. He talks candidly about the shock of retirement eight years ago, and what it meant to have men who could give him honest feedback about who he was when his title was gone.
