[10] After a year as farm student with Tommy Dale,[11] of Scoughall[12] in East Lothian, he was the third generation of his family to be a graduate of the Edinburgh School of Agriculture.

A number of television programmes highlighted the show garden including a BBC Songs of Praise with The Princess Royal being shown the plants by Barnaby Miln.

It was launched[20] in Edinburgh by Lady Marion Fraser LT on 12 February 1997 and held from 1 to 14 March 1997 when supporters of development charities like Christian Aid and Oxfam demanded their local supermarket stock fairtrade products.

For ten years starting in 1981, Miln and his life partner created and built up Hereford's first residential care home for the elderly.

Chairing a court in 1985 he had dealt with a case involving a burglar he sent to prison who responded by saying that as he had AIDS, an illness then almost unknown in Hereford, he was being given a death sentence "I know I could be dead within 18 months to two years and that is the worst punishment I could ever have.

A charity, Christian Action on AIDS, was set up on 14 July 1986,[35] supported by church leaders and with Canon John Bowker, Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, as its president and Barnaby Miln as its chairman.

Once the three-week-long Conference was under way the Archbishop of Canterbury asked Miln to gather support for a last-minute resolution on homosexuality 'to hold the position reached in 1978'[37] in the name of the Bishop of New York, Paul Moore.

This was cited in his Preface by the next Archbishop, Dr George Carey, as a reason for the publication in December 1991 of a Statement by the House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England, Issues in Human Sexuality.

[45] But Dr Jonathan Mann at the World Health Organization was a member of the archiepiscopal working party on AIDS[46] for the Lambeth Conference chaired by Barnaby Miln.

This planted the seed for Mann and his colleagues, James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, to set up what became World AIDS Day, held on 1 December each year since 1988.

Miln's mother, Norah Kathleen (1918-2012) was the younger daughter of the Reverend Hugh Douglas Swan (1881-1981) Church of Scotland minister of the ‘Muckle’ Kirk of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire between 1915 and 1951.

Her maternal grandfather was James Farmer Brown, (1855-1929)[51] who was honorary superintendent of the Edinburgh Sabbath Free Breakfast and People's Palace Mission[52] from 1874 for more than fifty years.

In 1986 Miln met Derek Pattinson, then secretary-general of the General Synod of the Church of England and chairman of the executive committee of SPCK, formerly the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

[53] Pattinson travelled as part of his work, and took Miln with him on a trip to South Africa in 1990; questions surrounding the propriety of this caused press attention.

O'Reilly died after an altercation with a drug dealer in London's King's Cross while buying cocaine as a forty-fifth birthday present for Miln.

At a meeting the night before, in Church House Westminster, Barnaby Miln declared that he was gay to much applause from the Open Synod Group he was addressing.

[61][62] Peter Tatchell, the gay activist, sitting in Barnaby Miln's support in the public gallery then shouted abuse at those opposing the motion and was escorted out of the building.

[63] In February 1990 Barnaby Miln demanded an emergency debate of the General Synod following the leaking of the Osborne report which claimed homosexuals were treated poorly by the church.

[69] Whilst on the General Synod Barnaby Miln was a trustee and later chairman of the Langley House Trust for ex-offenders[70] and treasurer of the (British) Churches Council on Alcohol and Drugs.

Larry Elliott, writing in The Guardian[73] on Monday 27 November 2000 states 'Not only has Jubilee 2000 been comfortably the most successful mass movement of the past 25 years, but it has also shown how the process known as globalisation is nurturing its own opponents.'

Sheer size was no doubt key to the Jubilee petition’s success: when talking to decision-makers, campaigners could rightly claim historic levels of public interest."

[76][77][78] When in 2002 his partner went to live in a nursing home and for the next four years, in Westminster, he set up a fee paying service for anyone wanting to explore their homosexuality and often with fetishes they would find difficult to explain to most people.

Miln told the undercover reporter that senior church figures, Westminster MPs, civil servants, and members of the royal household were amongst the clientele for his services and the monthly orgies he held.

The Organisation's purposes are to support, and stimulate artistic activity that draws on the rich Christian inheritance in music, visual, literary, material and performing arts.