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!
Listening
Many will gather this week to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. Some will travel many miles and by way of many different vehicles. Some will have a Norman Rockwell-style gathering, whereas most of us will be gathered in a more offbeat and less choreographed way. However we gather during the start of the holiday season, it is sure to be an opportunity for much sharing and listening. I look for the opportunity to get off from the main crowd to try to listen and reconnect to others during the chaos of a large gathering. Just the other day our neighborhood of 23 houses got together for a “Friendsgiving”. It was boisterous and loud, and I found it difficult to find a space that was quiet enough to really listen to someone else. It was a very frustrating experience for me.
This experience pointed out to me the importance of having the right environment to be able to focus on listening and connecting to another. It also caused me to reflect on how challenging it is for some people with decreased hearing to navigate large and noisy gatherings. Some of my neighbors are hearing impaired and their hearing aids don’t work well in places with a lot of ambient noise. They were quiet and a bit withdrawn as it was difficult for them to make conversation when they couldn’t hear what the other person was saying.
Our ears are wonderfully made and are an important part of our ability to connect with one another. Good listening skills have to be practiced, but with some repetition, we can all learn how to become better listeners. When I was team teaching medical students how to better interact with the people they were examining, we would have them role play an interaction in front of a group. One of the questions to the audience was what they heard in the interaction. How well did the physician-in-training listen to the person with whom they were interacting? Did they pick up on clues that the person was giving them that would lead them to a deeper relationship and trust?
That’s the key to good listening – blocking out all other inputs and really attending to the person who is speaking. Physician and writer, Rachel Naomi Remen, had this to offer on how important it is for us to listen to one another: “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention… A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. ”
We all know this to be true. We feel more whole and more visible when someone deeply listens to us. It may be why God made us with two ears and only one mouth – so that we can listen twice as much as we speak! I suspect that much of our broken social interactions could be healed if we would just sit down with one another and listen to what is on the mind and heart of someone else. The ability to just be with someone and listen to them – as long as the other needs us to listen – is a true gift.
The blessed assurance that we have as children of a loving and present God is that God listens to us. God is always wanting to hear from us in prayer and in everyday conversation. There is never a time when God is too busy or is too distracted – which is amazing, because God is everywhere all the time. God’s loving listening does have healing powers too. Talking with God can make us feel better, less anxious, less alone and afraid, more loved.
You may be longing for someone in your life to listen to you – just listen and not offer solutions or opinions. If so, then I invite you to a faith community this week. There you will find people doing their best to listen to God and to each other. They do it imperfectly but with the best of intentions. Maybe you have been told that you’re a good listener…most gatherings of people could use more of those. This week as you gather with friends and family, I hope that you can find some time to really listen. You’ll be blessed if you do. I hope you hear something wonderful this week!