This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Modekngei does not ask its members to choose between the Christian God and the traditional Palauan deities. Adherents believe in the Christian God and recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and at the same time make appeasements to the older deities, a doctrinal position the movement has held since its founding rather than a later compromise, and one that sets it apart from either a purely Christian church or a purely revivalist traditionalist movement.
That blend is visible in daily practice. Members attend daily services, abstain from alcohol and drugs, and observe a strict code of respect around sacred spaces, disciplines that look churchlike in form while carrying content specific to Modekngei's own teaching, transmitted in part through hymns called keskes that preserve indigenous language and belief inside a devotional structure. Ibobang village, in the state of Ngatpang on Babeldaob island, remains the movement's center, the same district where its founder Temedad began the movement around 1915.
The clearest institutional expression of Modekngei today is the Belau Modekngei School, established in 1974 and still operating, enrolling twenty five to thirty high school students and teaching traditional Palauan knowledge alongside the standard academic curriculum. With adherents now estimated at about 5.7 percent of Palau's population, down from a much larger share during the movement's early twentieth century growth, the school represents a deliberate strategy of passing the tradition to a next generation through education rather than relying on population growth alone.