This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Konkokyo does not center on communal liturgy or scripture study alone; it centers on toritsugi, a one on one act of mediated prayer that the founder Kawate Bunjiro performed himself before it became the ordained work of the religion's ministers, called kyoshi. A person brings a concrete trouble, illness, a difficult harvest, a family conflict, to a minister at one of Konkokyo's roughly 1,550 churches. The minister listens, then carries the words in prayer to Tenchi Kane no Kami, the single parental deity Konkokyo holds responsible for heaven and earth together, and relays back what comes of it.
The practice rests on a specific claim about how the deity and human beings relate: Tenchi Kane no Kami wishes to help and save people but, in Kawate Bunjiro's own recorded words, can do so only through other people. Toritsugi is the structure built to carry that dependency in both directions, so that divine help arrives through a named minister's attention rather than from an unmediated distance.
As of a December 2012 count, about 3,909 kyoshi carried out this practice across the religion's churches, a figure that gives some sense of how central the one on one meeting remains to Konkokyo, a century and a half after Kawate Bunjiro first began sitting with troubled visitors in Otani village.