After attending school in Stratford, Sharman entered the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) at Guelph in 1882 where he received a Diploma in Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science in 1884.
After a brief stint of farming, Sharman attended a normal school in Winnipeg and taught for one year in Birtle, Manitoba, before returning to the OAC in Guelph in 1890.
Showing considerably more interest in agriculture and business than in religion during his youth, Sharman was profoundly affected by the visit of T. H. Crossley, a Methodist evangelist, to Stratford in 1884 at a time when the Protestant churches of North America were being swept by religious revivals.
Henry Burton Sharman served as President from 1908 to 1920, and as a member of the Board of Directors until 1931; after only six years his goal of financial independence had been achieved.
After 1914 Sharman devoted several years to the writing, publishing his own parallel version of the New Testament Gospels in 1917, which he titled Records of the Life of Jesus.
He developed a unique seminar format for studying the Records, one which involved the Socratic method[5] of using probing questions to engage the gospel materials.
Sharman was something of an iconoclast, and challenged his students to seek to do God's will regardless of tradition, institutions or the potential cost of acting against doctrinal edicts.
From 1925 to 1946 Sharman conducted a yearly 6-week wilderness Bible retreat at remote Camp Minnesing in Algonquin Park, where he trained religious leaders from around the globe.
[1] In 1926 Henry Sharman returned to China where he remained for three years as an exchange professor in the History Department at Yenching University in Peking.
[9] Cyrus Leroy Baldridge, an important illustrator and activist, but not a Christian, remembered of his time at the University of Chicago that "I slipped through, really working in only one course, 'The Life of Jesus,' wherein Professor Sharman made the analytical method so exciting that a few of us actually exercised our minds.