More than 7,000 people gathered from November 20 to 23, 2025 at the Gravataí Events Park, in Rio Grande do Sul, for the Heirs Camporee. According to Notícias Adventistas, the official portal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the gathering brought together 208 Pathfinder clubs from the state, organized across ten simultaneous fronts, and had an added reason to take place: to mark the 50th anniversary of the first camporee held in Brazil.
That first gathering took place in 1975, in Santo Antônio da Patrulha, also in Rio Grande do Sul, and brought together 450 Pathfinders from 14 clubs. Half a century later, one of its organizers, Pastor Jason McCracken, now 71, returned to the state to take part in the celebration — this time before a movement that, according to official sources, has grown to more than 243,000 young people in eight countries.
What the Heirs Camporee was
According to Notícias Adventistas, the Heirs Camporee was held from November 20 to 23, 2025, at the Gravataí Events Park, in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre. The gathering brought together more than 7,000 participants — Pathfinders, leaders and volunteers — from different cities across Rio Grande do Sul.
In all, the official portal reported, 208 clubs from the state were on site, spread across ten simultaneous activity fronts. The program included outdoor activities, competitions, musical performances, talks and service actions, according to coverage by the Adventist press and local outlets such as Jornal O Sul.
A camporee is the large campout that brings several Pathfinder clubs together at once — a kind of high point of the movement, with days of tent life, tests, ceremonies and spiritual programming. It is in this format that the clubs of a region, a state or an entire country come together, and it was exactly this type of event that completed half a century of history in Brazil.
1975: Brazil's first camporee
The reason for the celebration lies in 1975. According to Notícias Adventistas, the first camporee held in Brazil took place from November 14 to 16, 1975, in Santo Antônio da Patrulha, in Rio Grande do Sul. It brought together 450 Pathfinders spread across 14 clubs.
According to Revista Adventista, it was during this period that the large club campouts in the country officially began to be called "camporees," inspired by the North American model. Some clubs traveled long distances to get there: the same publication reports that one of the groups came from Uruguaiana, on the western border, crossing more than 700 kilometers to reach the gathering site.
The organization of that first camporee fell to Pastor José Maria Barbosa Silva and to the then young North American missionary Jason McCracken, who supported the initiative. Fifty years later, that same name would reappear in Rio Grande do Sul — now as a guest of honor.
The return of Jason McCracken
The symbolic highlight of the Heirs Camporee was the return of Jason McCracken, now 71, who came back to Rio Grande do Sul five decades after helping coordinate the 1975 camporee. According to Notícias Adventistas, he took part in the 2025 gathering as one of the speakers, sharing memories of that beginning.
According to an account published by Revista Adventista, McCracken described it as a privilege to have organized, alongside Pastor José Maria Barbosa, the country's first camporee, and said it was extraordinary to return half a century later and see the strength the ministry had reached. He also noted that the South American Division is home today, in his words, to the largest army of Pathfinders in the world
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The reunion gave the event the tone its name had already announced: "Heirs." The central idea, according to the organizers, was that today's Pathfinders are the heirs of a mission begun by earlier generations — and McCracken, present on stage, was the living bridge between 1975 and 2025.
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The contrast in numbers sums up what has changed in fifty years. In 1975, according to official sources, the program gathered 450 members across 14 clubs in Rio Grande do Sul. In 2025, Notícias Adventistas reported, the Pathfinder movement already spans more than 243,000 children, teenagers and young people in eight South American countries.
The Pathfinder Club is a movement run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, aimed at the formation and development of children and teenagers, generally from age 10 onward. Its activities combine outdoor life, honors, drill, Bible study and community service — and regional coordination in South America falls to the South American Division, or DSA, the church's administrative arm that brings together the eight countries mentioned.
It was this continental scale that McCracken said he had not imagined in 1975. What began as a campout of a few hundred young people in a small city in Rio Grande do Sul became, according to the church, one of the largest youth movements in the worldwide Adventist territory.
A city-sized setup and a service effort
Gathering thousands of people for four days required an operation the size of a small temporary city. According to Notícias Adventistas and Jornal O Sul, the structure set up in Gravataí included water reservoirs, around 200 hot showers and 200 portable toilets, plus a medical post, ambulances and security teams to care for participants.
The camporee also had a service component. According to the outlets that covered the event, ADRA — the Adventist humanitarian agency — coordinated actions aimed at families in situations of vulnerability in Gravataí, with Pathfinders involved in preparing food kits for donation.
This kind of initiative is part of the identity of camporees: beyond the tests and the spiritual programming, the large gatherings usually include projects that make an impact on the host community, leaving a social legacy in the host city.
Why this camporee matters
Beyond the numbers, the Heirs Camporee served as a landmark of memory. By placing the founder of the first gathering and thousands of young people who were not even born in 1975 in the same space, the event made concrete the idea of continuity that gives the movement its name.
Regional camporees like the one in Gravataí take place periodically and serve as preparation and mobilization for the large national and division gatherings. For families and clubs, they are also one of the most anticipated moments of the calendar — months of drill training, honors and camping that culminate in a few days of gathering.
The 50th-anniversary milestone, in that sense, offered a rare opportunity: to hear from someone who was there at the start what that 1975 campout represented, and to measure, in people and countries, the path traveled since then. As the organizers themselves put it, today's Pathfinders are the heirs of that history.