Ratana divided his own mission in two. The first half was the spiritual work, te ture wairua, the healing and the turning of people to God. The second was the bodily or temporal work, te ture tangata, and its object was the Treaty of Waitangi.
In 1924 he travelled with a party to Geneva to put a petition before the League of Nations, and to England seeking an audience with the King. He was received by neither. A petition bearing tens of thousands of signatures asking that the Treaty be given legal force was presented to the New Zealand parliament and made no progress.
The conclusion he drew was that the Treaty would be honoured only by whoever held the four Maori seats in parliament, and the movement turned to electoral politics. The first Ratana member was elected in 1932; by the early 1940s the movement held all four seats, in a formal alliance with the Labour Party made in 1936. That alliance lasted, with strains, for the rest of the century, and it made the Ratana Church a permanent element of New Zealand public life rather than a religious movement alone.
He died in 1939. The church he founded continues, with congregations across New Zealand and among Maori in Australia, and the January gathering at Ratana Pa remains the fixed point of its year and of the country's political calendar. It is a living church and is described here rather than assessed.