Rev. Dan Albrant serves as the pastor for both Mineral and Mt. Pleasant UMC’s.
Welcome to the website for the Mineral-Mount Pleasant Charge of The United Methodist Church! We are very glad you stopped by for a visit and to learn more about us. Our churches have been yoked together in a charge (that is they share one pastor) since 1947. The churches themselves are only about 6 miles apart, one in the town of Mineral, and the other closer to the town of Louisa.
I have been the pastor of this Charge since July 2022. I was pastor of the Madison Charge in Madison, Virginia, from July 2017 to June 2022. Prior to that I was a hospital clinical pharmacist, practicing in intensive care, emergency departments, and operating rooms. I served as a consultant on new pharmacist practices and quality improvement as well as designing and implementing new training programs for pharmacists to improve patient outcomes.
You may be wondering how I got from Pharmacy to Ministry? Good question…it was an evolution. I was called by God to be a pharmacist, of that I am certain. During my time working in the high stress, low touch environment of intensive care, I began to feel disquieted in my soul. Something was missing – I needed to care for people in a different and more wholistic way. So, God moved me along a path of rejoining church, getting involved in Stephen Ministry as a minister and leader, and in an intentional period of spiritual growth. All this took about 12 years before I found myself at age 50 with the strong desire to attend Seminary. I attended Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, from 2013 to 2017 and graduated with a Masters of Divinity degree with honors.
The United Methodist Church has gone through a season of change with disaffiliation of about 20% of its churches. That time has now ended, and both of these churches remain firmly United Methodist under the care and direction of our Resident Bishop. Our worship style is Traditional, and sermons come directly from the weekly scripture readings of the Revised Common Lectionary (used by many Christian denominations). There is a Choir at the Mineral UMC and many wonderful ministries for you to engage in at both churches. We hope that you will come and give us a try one Sunday. You will be warmly welcomed, and we believe that you will feel like you are at home.
I love serving the rural church and her people. My wife and I have found a home here at Lake Anna and we look forward to many years of ministry outreach, worship, fellowship and fun. We enjoy sharing our lives with those whom God has called to be the church of Jesus Christ. We have two young adult sons, one of whom flies for NetJets and the other who is training to be an electrician. Our black Labrador, Hope, rounds out our immediate family. Let me know how I might be of service to you, or how we might pray for people or situations that are important to you. You can find copies of my sermons under the "Blogs" tab and links to other resources for your spiritual journey. May God bless you on your way!
Friendship
I have been blessed to have many friends over the course of my life. I have very few “close” friends – those are the chums from my youth, the ones with whom I grew. Common wisdom states that it gets harder to make and keep friends as we age. I have not found that to be true. In both of my careers over the last 40 years I have made many friends – people that helped me along my way and people whom I really enjoy seeing and sharing a bit of my life. I have found that friendships are the stuff of life. Each new friend brings a new perspective on life, and new set of hopes and dreams, a new set of life skills. I find it fascinating to get to know people well enough to have them become friends – friendships broaden and deepen my life and make it more worth living.
It has been helpful over the years to surround myself with people who are far more extroverted than me. These are folks who will continue to pull me out of my preferred “wall flower” status and engage me with new people and new situations. Left to my own devices, I would probably stay at home and read or sit watching the grass grow or the sun set and be quite content. I would be missing out on so much, however. Friends should be the ones who stimulate us to continue to grow and become all that we are intended to become.
How do we make friends? It is a mystery to me how some people just “click” together. Sometimes there are shared experiences, sometimes there are shared passions, sometimes it just seems that two people were looking for each other and they united in that shared search. Whatever happens, it is a wonderful event that most often comes to be a blessing in our lives and then a blessing out into the world. Spiritual writer, C. S. Lewis wrote this about friendship, “…In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting - any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others….”
The blessed assurance that we have as children of God is that we were made to be in relationship with other humans. We all are seeking to find people to bond with, to walk through life with, to share life experiences, to have the beauty of others revealed to us. From the opening of the Bible, we hear God say that it is not good for humans to be alone, so he made Eve to be with Adam. God continues to provide us with opportunities to connect with one another so that we can live full and fruitful lives – and so that we can see more of the beauty of God in each person that we meet.
We live in a time where many people have isolated themselves or have limited their friendships to like-minded people. This is unfortunate, because it limits the power of God to help us grow and develop into well-rounded people. This week, I invite you to come to a faith community, if you are not already part of one. There you will find friendly people who are searching for someone just like you. You may need to journey to a few different faith communities in order to find just the right one, but I promise you that it is out there. There are loving and supportive friends that are waiting for you to come into their lives. I hope that you will choose to become their friend. Blessings for your journey!