Benjamin Miller was born in 1715. As a child he and his family attended the Presbyterian church pastored by Gilbert Tennent. Under the peaching of the Protestants, Benjamin was born again. When Tennent encouraged young Miller to study for the ministry under the tutelage of a man named Biram, he began to study the Bible in the original languages. From that, and after hearing Biram preach a sermon at the christening of a child, he began to see that infant baptism was unscriptural. Soon he offered himself for membership in the Baptist church at Piscataway, New Jersey, and was immersed in 1740. Four years later the Piscataway church dismissed Miller and several others to form a church down the road at Scotch Plains. On this day in 1748, the new church ordained Brother Miller to become their pastor, and he faithfully served there until his death, thirty-four years later.
Scotch Plains and Benjamin Miller were at the center of Baptist activity in the middle of the 18th Century. As a part of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, he knew just about every Baptist preacher in the middle colonies. Two men to whom he was particularly close were John Gano, the pastor at New York, and Benjamin Stelle, the pastor at Piscataway. Also, when the Separatist preacher Daniel Marshal left his missionary work among the Mohawks and moved to West Virginia, it was Miller who visited him and concluded that the Separatists were warm-hearted, Bible believing brethren, worthy of fellowship and encouragement.
