Mr Paul Delamere (Paora Teramea) has been President of the Church since 1938. A Ringatu Meeting At Ruatoki In the Ringatu Church the two most important religious meetings are those held each year in the first days of January and the first days of June. At these times, as well as at smaller monthly meetings, the people gather together to give thanks to God for having looked after them since their last meeting; to ask forgiveness for their sins; and to pray for His blessing in the future. Last January ‘Te Ao Hou’ was a guest at a Ringatu meeting held, as it is each six months, at Ruatoki. We learnt much about the Ringatu faith from the kind explanations of the President of the Church, Mr Paul Delamere, and from many of the other people there, and it was at this meeting that Ans Westra took the photographs on these pages. The Ringatu Church was founded by Te Kooti. Te Kooti is, to say the least, a controversial figure, and partly because of this, outsiders' attitudes towards Ringatu have sometimes been rather puzzled, even disapproving. In the past, much of the district in which the followers of Ringatu mostly live (the Bay of Plenty, the Ureweras, and parts of the Gisborne district and East Coast) was rather remote from the main centres of population. Many Ringatu followers led rather isolated lives—isolated, that is, from pakehas; Maoris do not lead lives isolated from each other. The people of the Ureweras, in particular, had retained many of the old attitudes and customs, and this made some outsiders suspicious of their religion. In past years this