Toronto - Dr. Howard Snyder will be installed to The Donald N. and Kathleen G. Bastian Chair of Wesley Studies on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at 11:30 a.m. in the Van Norman Worship and Study Centre at Tyndale's Ballyconnor campus. Dr. Snyder will deliver the main address. The public is invited.

Dr. Snyder, a well-known author and educator, comes to Tyndale from Asbury Seminary where he has served for the past 10 years as a professor of the History and Theology of Mission in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism. Previously he taught at United Theological Seminary and led churches in Chicago and Detroit. From 1968 to 1975 he served as pastor and seminary professor in São Paulo, Brazil with the Free Methodist Church.

Among Dr. Snyder’s highly acclaimed and influential books are The Problem of Wineskins (1975), The Community of the King 1977 (rev. ed., 2004), and The Radical Wesley and Patterns for Church Renewal (1980). He is also the editor of Global Good News: Mission in a New Context (Abingdon, 2001) and co-author with Daniel V. Runyon of Decoding the Church: Mapping the DNA of Christ’s Body (2002). Recent works include Populist Saints: B. T. and Ellen Roberts and the First Free Methodists(2006) and Live While You Preach: The Autobiography of Methodist Revivalist and Abolitionist John Wesley Redfield(1810-1863), which he edited in 2006.

Dr. Snyder is a frequent speaker and lecturer at colleges, seminaries, and conferences around the world. In 1993, he and his wife Janice visited thirteen countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, studying the life and renewal of the Church. He is an ordained elder in the Ohio Conference of the Free Methodist Church.

Bishop Emeritus Donald N. Bastian of the Free Methodist Church in Canada, and his wife, Kay, have been recognized by having a chair established in their honour at Tyndale Seminary, Toronto. Founded in 1894, Tyndale is a trans-denominational university college and seminary located in north Toronto. Currently, there are over 1,200 students and more than 9,000 alumni. Tyndale offers a variety of degree programs in a wide range of disciplines and fully-accredited programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The programs prepare leaders to serve in churches, mission agencies and the marketplace in Canada and throughout the world.