About Camp Meeting

What is Camp Meeting?

Camp meeting is a long-standing practice in Seventh-day Adventist life: a congregation sets aside a run of consecutive days and gives them over to worship, Bible teaching, prayer and being together, at a pace ordinary weeks do not allow. It is not a conference and not a retreat. The nearest description is a week of church, held in daylight and in company.

What makes it different from a normal week of services is duration and repetition. The same people come back morning after morning, the teaching builds across days rather than resetting each Sabbath, and there is time in the programme for the parts of church life that a single service has to leave out.

The wider denomination keeps its own account of the practice and of what Adventists believe. That is theirs to state, not ours to summarise, so this page points at it rather than paraphrasing it.

The shape of a day

Most days follow the same arc. They open at 07:00 with prayer and morning devotion, then Bible study while the day is still quiet. The morning builds through teaching towards the main service late in the morning, which is the service most people plan their day around.

The afternoon is where the ministries take their turn: health, family life, and the sessions that speak to a particular part of church life rather than to everyone at once. The day closes with the evening service, which has the same shape as the mid-morning one and its own sermon.

The last session ends at 18:15. Not every day is the full arc: the opening and closing Sabbaths keep the Divine Service in place of the mid-morning one, and Friday stops at midday because the afternoon and evening are Sabbath preparation.

Who it is for

Everyone in the congregation, and visitors from other churches. There is no registration and nothing to book. The programme is built so that someone who can only come for an evening still arrives at a whole service rather than the middle of one.

Alongside the services, four ministries run tracks of their own across the week: Family Life, Health and Christian Education. Children have their own Children's Corner in the mid-morning and evening services as well. Every other ministry in the programme is searchable on the schedule page, filtered by ministry.

Practical notes

Camp Meeting 2026 runs 15 to 22 August 2026, 8 days, hosted by Seventh-day Adventist Church Newlife at 5th Ngong Avenue, Nairobi.

Every time on this site is East Africa Time, the wall clock in Nairobi, whatever time zone you are reading in. Each day is grouped into named blocks (Morning Service, Divine Service, Afternoon Program and the rest), and the schedule marks whichever session is running as you read it.

A few activities in the printed programme have no published start time and run for a whole block instead. They are shown in place, marked as having no set time, rather than being given times we do not have.

For anyone who cannot be in the building, the livestream page carries the player and what is on now.

The host church

Seventh-day Adventist Church Newlife is on 5th Ngong Avenue, Nairobi. This site is a companion to Camp Meeting 2026 and is kept separate from the church's main site, which carries its own news, ministry pages and weekly bulletin.