The IAMS was founded in 1972, but the impulse dated from the vision of the late Olav G. Myklebust, then director of the Egede Institute in Oslo.
IAMS links individual scholars and missiological associations from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific together with "North America, Germany, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, South Africa, India and elsewhere."[REF]