Priest Stephen Miller found his calling early in life, it was later that he found a home in Hong Kong
- Born in Britain, Stephen Miller could sail a boat before he could ride a bike and knew from a young age that he wanted to become an Anglican priest
- He was to combine his passions at Mission Seafarers, a Christian welfare charity that serves ships’ crews around the world
A nagging thing: I was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex, southern England, in 1963, and learned to sail before I could ride a bike. My dad worked for Plessey Aerospace as an aerospace engineer. He travelled a lot for work, and it was mum who raised my older brother and sister and I in our early years.
From Leigh-on-Sea we moved to Fareham, on the Hampshire coast. My family were regular church-goers and I knew from the age of 13 that I wanted to be an Anglican priest. It felt like a calling; a nagging thing that didn’t go away.
Plain sailing: Growing up I did the Royal Yachting Association courses – Competent Crew, Day Skipper, Coastal Skipper, Yachtmaster – and when I was older I did my Ocean Master. I went to the University of London to study cell biology and genetics, and over the long summer holidays I did yacht deliveries with a friend. We sailed the yachts down the River Hamble, in Hampshire, and through the Bay of Biscay to France or Spain.
At university there weren’t people around me going to church and I felt there was something missing. I found a church in the East End of London that seemed very rooted and was (tackling) lots of social justice issues and projects that I could get involved in. The vicar was really cool and rode a motorbike.
Breakthrough drug: My degree was a sandwich course and in my third year I worked for the Agricultural Research Council’s Unit of Nitrogen Fixation, at Sussex University, and got hooked on that genetic side of trying to make plants fix nitrogen. When I graduated, I had a couple of offers to go into research, but decided to work for a pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Ingelheim.