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. It was a German company that had spent a lot of money on biotechnology but in England they didn’t have many people who understood the drugs they were perfecting. I was employed to head up an interesting drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which dissolves clots in your body that are brand new. They didn’t have a package to explain it to doctors, so that was my job. The idea was that every GP should have a shot of this in their bag. Now it’s widely used. The company was based in Bagshot and I was based (about 200km away) in Kidderminster, in the West Midlands. I started going to St John’s Church in Kidderminster, where I became good friends with the vicar. He was also into sailing and I’d join his family on sailing holidays and help him out sailing. He mentored me through what it would be to come into the church. Going through the motions: In April 1988, the Diocese of Worcester sponsored me to go forward to ordination. It’s a complicated process. Your parish priest sponsors you and puts you forward to the next level, which is the archdeacon and the Diocesan Director of Ordinands, and then you are interviewed by three clergy examiners and three lay examiners to see whether they feel you are saying the right things as to whether you have a calling. Then you are interviewed by the bishop and sponsored for a selection process. In the October, I went to a 48-hour conference at a retreat house in Northampton where you sleep, eat, drink, worship and have a number of interviews. Just after Christmas I learned that I’d been accepted for training. Like many people who are born by the sea, I found it difficult not to be near the seaside. It’s where I can think clearly Stephen Miller Rough area: I did a degree in theology at Lincoln Theological College. When I graduated, I went to work at the Wren’s Nest and Priory estates in Dudley. They were huge council estates of 4,500 houses and flats and it was quite a rough area. Although I’d lived in the East End of London, it was a real eye-opener. The house I was living in was broken into three times and I soon decided it wasn’t worth having a good hi-fi system or television. The biggest issue was single-parent families. We started parenting and cooking classes for 14-year-old girls who’d had a child. Dudley is landlocked – it’s at least 100 miles (160km) in any direction to the sea. I had a motorbike and spent most of my days off going to the Welsh coast. Like many people who are born by the sea, I found it difficult not to be near the seaside. It’s where I can think clearly. Warm welcome: From there I went to St Mary’s Hurst Hill, Sedgley, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, and was a vicar there for 6½ years. It was there that I met Catherine (Graham), who was working for the Diocese of Worcester as the World Mission Officer. She was a layperson who had experience working overseas with (British charity) United Society Partners in the Gospel in India, and Habitat for Humanity (an American NGO) in Guatemala and a number of South American countries. It was Catherine who suggested I think about working for the Mission to Seafarers. Most of the people in the parish either worked in the steelworks or in the automotive industry and I visited my parishioners in factories, and I enjoyed that. I was posted to Rotterdam (in the Netherlands) for nearly three years. There were 12 other chaplains working in the port. I didn’t know a great deal about the shipping industry, so I took a post-grad degree in marine policy and maritime law at Erasmus University. My normal working day was ship visiting from 8.30am to 1pm, then I studied, then I worked again from 6.30pm until midnight, driving seafarers back to the ships and the seafarers centres. Because seafarers are always behind a security gate, not many people get to visit them, so the welcome you are offered is often quite warm because you are not wanting anything. Everyone else who goes on a ship wants them to sign something or give orders, whereas the chaplain is there just to say hello, see how they are and if they want to share anything. No apology necessary: Catherine had been coming out to Rotterdam once a month and I’d been going back for long weekends and we got to the point where we couldn’t live without each other. We got married in 2001. She had just moved out to Rotterdam when the mission asked me to go to Dubai. We arrived in Dubai on September 10, 2001; the following day was 9/11. The locals were so saddened by what had happened that when they saw a Westerner they’d apologise. It was nothing to do with them, although clearly they felt a responsibility. It was hard work. There were a lot of ship abandonments and issues about processing and helping the seafarers who hadn’t been paid for many months. In 2003, the Iraq war meant there were huge numbers of ships that were abandoned, especially those that had been going backwards and forwards daily to Iraq. I managed to get legal companies to do pro bono work and, by the time I left Dubai, in 2011, we had about 20 companies doing pro bono work. Heading to Hong Kong: After 20 years as chaplain at the Mission in Hong Kong, Peter Ellis was leaving and suggested I might like to come here. For a long time, they’d been talking about pulling down the Mariners’ Club , in Tsim Sha Tsui, and redeveloping it into a new mission and a hotel, but it had never got over the line. Catherine and I arrived in Hong Kong in May 2011. Catherine, meanwhile, had gone forward for training for ordination. In 2008, she’d gone to Ripon College, Oxford, and, in 2010, she was ordained at Salisbury Diocese. We arrived in Hong Kong in the May and, in November, she was priested in St John’s Cathedral (in Central), and spent eight years as a chaplain there. The Hong Kong mission has been here since 1863 and has a long legacy of serving seafarers. My job now is senior chaplain and I’m also the regional director for the mission in East Asia, so I cover 12 missions, from Myanmar to Japan. Sixty per cent of the world’s seafarers come from East Asia and it’s a place that the mission wants to invest in. Traditionally, the Mission to Seafarers was a home away from home for seafarers, but now we are starting to form networks to support the whole family, not just the person at sea. We hope that the redevelopment project (of the Mariner’s Club) will be completed towards the end of 2023 and Catherine and I will move into a flat there.