The name Ringatu means the upraised hand. Where a Christian congregation might make the sign of the cross, worshippers raise the right hand at the end of a prayer, and the gesture gives the church its name.
Its liturgy was built out of the Old Testament and composed in the Chatham Islands and afterwards. The texts, the panui, were not written down for the first generations; they were held in memory and recited, and the ability to carry them was what qualified a person to lead worship. Services are held on the twelfth day of each month, a pattern that structures the church's year, with two of those days observed as major festivals. There is no ordained ministry in the usual sense and no building requirement; a meeting house serves.
After the pardon Te Kooti spent his last decade travelling among communities, settling disputes, composing waiata and sayings that are still quoted, and consolidating the church rather than leading anything else. He died in 1893.
Ringatu is a living church, with congregations concentrated in the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast, and it is described here rather than assessed. The reassessment of its founder in New Zealand, from a figure named in a century of settler accounts as a murderer to one recognised as a religious leader and a prophet, came slowly and is bound up with a wider reckoning over the confiscations and the wars.