Howard A. Snyder serves as distinguished professor, chair of Wesley studies, at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From 1996 to 2006 he was professor of the history and theology of mission in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He has also taught at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio; and North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago; and has pastored in Chicago and Detroit.

Howard was born in the Dominican Republic to missionary parents from the United States. He is a graduate of Spring Arbor Junior College (1960), Greenville College (1962), and Asbury Theological Seminary (1966). He completed his doctorate in historical theology at the University of Notre Dame in 1983. From 1968 to 1975 he served as pastor and seminary professor in São Paulo, Brazil, with the Free Methodist Church.

Howard's books include The Problem of Wineskins (1975), The Community of the King (1977; revised edition, 2004), and The Radical Wesley and Patterns for Church Renewal (1980). Other books include EarthCurrents: The Struggle for the World's Soul, published by Abingdon Press, and Radical Renewal: The Problem of Wineskins Today, a revised edition of The Problem of Wineskins (2005). He is the editor of Global Good News: Mission in a New Context (Abingdon, 2001) and the author—with Daniel V. Runyon—of Decoding the Church: Mapping the DNA of Christ's Body (2002). In 2006 he published the biography Populist Saints: B. T. and Ellen Roberts and the First Free Methodists (Eerdmans) and the autobiography of evangelist and abolitionist John Wesley Redfield (1810–1863), which he edited (Scarecrow Press, 2006).

Howard has spoken on number occasions at colleges, seminaries, and conferences, including the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland; the 1991 Evangelism 2000 Conference in Hong Kong; and the Mission Korea 2000 Conference in Seoul. He has done short-term teaching in Brazil, Singapore, and other countries. In 1993 he and his wife, Janice, visited 13 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, studying the life and renewal of the church.

Howard is an ordained elder in the Ohio Conference of the Free Methodist Church. He and Janice have four married children and twelve grandchildren.