Tyndale University College & Seminary

The Toronto Bible Training School was founded in 1894 by a group of brethren under the supervision of Elmore Harris pastor of Walmer Road Baptist Church. Elmore Harris became the first President. William Boyd Stewart (former pastor of Bond Street Baptist Church) was the first Principal. Courses were held at the Walmer Road Church for the first four years until they relocated to new facilities the Gothic Revival building at 110 College Street (demolished after 1928 and now site of the University of Toronto's Banting and Best Department of Medical Research Building since 1930) in 1898 financed chiefly through generous contributions of the Harris family. (This land had been leased from the University of Toronto). The name of the school was changed to Toronto Bible College in 1912 and in September 1928 relocated to 16 Spadina Road (just north of Bloor Street and now Native Canadian Centre) when the lease expired.[5] It became the first permanent Canadian Bible school and only the third in North America.[6] The founders' vision of TBC was to train laypeople as "Sunday School teachers, Pastors' Assistants, and as City, Home and Foreign Missionaries."[7] The institution's leadership was largely Baptist and Presbyterian, but also included Methodists and Anglicans.[8] The TBC graduation service was always a significant Toronto event, held initially at Massey Hall, and then moved to the University of Toronto's Varsity Stadium to accommodate crowds as large as 6,000.[9] In the 1940s, the school's president, John McNicol, steered a path between modernism and ultra-fundamentalism (specifically dispensationalism)--both of which McNicol denounced as threats to the health of the church.[10] This unique position gained TBC the support of evangelicals in a variety of mainline denominations.[11]