Each year since 2012, church and missions leaders passionate about integrating evangelism with practical community development — health, poverty alleviation, church planting, and more — have gathered for a few days of what organizers call “Inspiring, Wholistic, Missional, and Christ-centered collaboration.” That gathering is the International Wholistic Missions Conference, known to most in the network simply as IWMC.
For many years, IWMC was hosted in the Phoenix, Arizona area. More recently, it’s gone global — Albania in 2025, and this year, Chiapas, Mexico, with the theme “God’s Favor: Restoring Shalom.”
The conference is organized by the Global CHE Network, which connects people and organizations using the Community Health Evangelism (CHE) strategy to serve impoverished communities worldwide. More than 900 organizations across 136 countries are part of that network. The overarching goal, in the Network’s own words, is to “set in motion connections and conversations that strengthen wholistic ministries worldwide through the exchange of ideas and the formation of partnerships.”
Several MAI resource and regional coordinators plan to be in attendance at this year’s conference in Chiapas — and the experiences of those who’ve gone before say a lot about why IWMC matters to the wider wholistic missions community.
Why MAI Keeps Showing Up
For Kelly Pick, an MAI volunteer who attends IWMC each year with her husband Verne, the draw is both professional and personal. “We attend IWMC as we are often asked to do workshops, and we love to share with others and learn from them as well,” Kelly says. “We also attend for the connections we make, and to see old friends/colleagues from across the world.”
That mix of teaching, learning, and reunion is exactly what the Global CHE Network had in mind when it built the conference — a space where practitioners doing similar work across dozens of countries can compare notes rather than reinvent the wheel alone.
Long Roots in the Global CHE Network
MAI and MAI’s Women’s Health International Coordinator, Maggie, have a long history with IWMC. Maggie was first invited to the Arizona conference in 2014 as a volunteer, presenting alongside a colleague on a maternal-newborn health training she’d developed in response to needs expressed by field workers overseas. That conference connected her with several people who were then shaping CHE’s other women’s health work — connections that would prove lasting.
When Maggie joined MAI staff in 2016, IWMC quickly became a fixture of her year: facilitating a pre-conference Women’s Cycle of Life (WCL) training, running workshops, and building relationships across the wider network. It’s also where she brought in Kelly and Verne Pick — Kelly joining the WCL trainings and gaining exposure to dozens of organizations doing wholistic ministry, and Verne gradually taking on a bigger role behind the camera as the conference’s informal photographer.
For Maggie, the 2025 conference — IWMC’s first outside the U.S., held in Albania — marked a turning point. It drew international trainers and ministry leaders she’d known for years, and she got to hear firsthand how trainings from a decade earlier were still multiplying in places like Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Albania, and Serbia. It was also a chance to help newer trainers discover CHE and Women’s Health resources — learning not just from Western practitioners, but from an international group with deep, long-term, on-the-ground experience.
This year, Maggie plans to head to Chiapas to lead two workshops, hoping to equip regional ministry leaders with tools for more effective wholistic ministry — and, as always, to learn from what others are already doing in the field.
Stories from the Field
Beyond the workshops and networking, IWMC is also where MAI staff, volunteers and global representatives have heard, over the years, how CHE trainings ripple outward — often through partner organizations, in places MAI may never get full credit or even a full report. As Maggie put it, that may be the real story: the equipping itself is bearing fruit in more places than any one organization can track. Some of it we hear about. Some of it, only heaven will show us.
A few of those stories, shared at past IWMC gatherings:
- Young Muslim girls coming to faith in Christ and discovering their worth in God’s eyes — while their mentors carefully help them remain rooted in their families and communities, praying that those around them will be drawn to faith rather than pushed away. It’s Spirit-led, delicate work: practical skills training that parents value, paired with a quiet demonstration of God’s love in action.
- Women in a Hindu-majority context gathering weekly to learn income-generating skills, alongside Bible study, prayer, and friendship — a rare space of joy and personal recognition in otherwise demanding lives. Neighbors notice the joy and come looking for its source, finding life in Jesus even as they navigate real social pressure for leaving their faith tradition.
- Roma communities finding new life in Christ and in a growing church — with visible, practical fruit: cleaner neighborhoods, children in school, steady work, and families choosing to stay and invest in their communities rather than migrate elsewhere.
- Women learning about healthy pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care — paired with the deeper message that they are precious to God, even in societies where they’re undervalued or mistreated. Alongside the health training, they’re learning how to look out for and protect one another.
- And from a master trainer in Central Asia: women coming to faith and gathering in house churches, worshiping under real risk of fines and imprisonment — sustained, as she described it, simply by their love for Jesus.
These stories are a reminder of why conferences like IWMC matter. The training MAI provides doesn’t stay contained to MAI’s own programs — it multiplies through hundreds of partner organizations, in places and ways that often go unseen.
Learn More
If your church or organization is exploring how to integrate evangelism with practical, wholistic community development, the Global CHE Network and events like IWMC are a great place to start.
We also recommend visiting our resources page where you can find “Healing Lives” back issues. Our Winter 2018 issue features an interview with Dr. Bibiana Mac Leod, (MAI’s South American and Caribbean Regional Coordinator at that time) at the 2017 IWCM that focuses on the First Thousand Days program.
