The International Ministers and Lay Association of the A.M.E. Zion Church was organized in January 1938. After the Board of Bishops decided to hold closed sessions during its mid-winter session held January 13-15, 1937, at First A.M.E. Zion Church, Paterson, N.J., the ministers and laymen who customarily attended these meetings became imbued with an exhilaration for connectional causes. They, therefore, organized themselves into a body to stimulate interest in general church affairs. 

Meeting simultaneously with the mid-winter sessions of the Board of Bishops, the new group formed its organization on January 12, 1938, at St. Peter's A.M.E. Zion Church in New Bern, N.C., and elected Rev. Hilliard R. Jackson of Brooklyn, N.Y. (serving as presiding elder of the Hartford District, New England Conference) its first president.

The organization began to chart its course with rudimentary procedures and developed tenaciously. Although not a constitutional organization of the church, it is one of the cooperative movements within the church that seeks to help in the execution of plans and purposes of the denomination and to apply its forcefulness to the trends and needs of the times.