The organisation's National Council will vote on new reforms at Saturday's extraordinary general meeting.
The reforms are needed to meet a new code of conduct for sport governing bodies - and those which fail to adopt it could lose their funding.
"We must decide how we want our sport to look in the future," added Howden.
"We can choose to be a sport which has a leading role in the public life of this country, or we can choose to turn the clock back 30 or more years."
His statement comes after former British Cycling chief executive Peter King told the BBC that he expected the proposals to be rejected by the National Council, which represents 130,000 members.
King says the board now faces a fight secure a 75% majority required to vote through the changes.
To date, the government has had mixed results persuading sports to adopt its Code for Sports Governance, designed to improve governance standards across sport.
In May, the Football Association's council finally approved reforms, having been threatened with a £15m funding cut.
But earlier this month, the national governing body for table tennis became the first to reject the government's standards and had its full £9m Sport England funding award suspended as a result.
Funding agency Sport England has allocated £17m to British Cycling to boost grassroots participation, while UK Sport is set to invest £26m for its Olympic and Paralympic teams' preparations for Tokyo 2020.
British Cycling is one of the country's best-funded and most successful sports governing bodies and has been the driving force behind the country's unprecedented success in recent Olympic and Paralympic Games - Britain won a combined 33 medals across the Rio 2016 Olympics and Paralympics.
But its continued funding now hinges on complying with sports minister Tracey Crouch's governance code.
From November, boards of governing bodies must be more independent and diverse, and be "the ultimate decision-making body and exercise all of the powers of the organisation".
British Cycling executives - including Howden and chairman Jonathan Browning - have been attending a series of regional meetings in a bid to convince members to support a package of reforms designed to meet the new standards.
These include:
Cycling "could be lost to an entire generation" if £43m of public funding is withdrawn, says British Cycling president Bob Howden.