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!
Growth
I was looking at the sunflowers in my garden just now. Some of the stalks are 10 to 12 feet tall (not an exaggeration) and they are filled with blooms. Nothing makes me smile like a big, beautiful sunflower blossom – it just reminds me of all the best things about summer. I also like to watch the flowers as they follow the sun across the lawn each day. They really are amazing plants and the most amazing thing about them from my perspective is their growth. They start off as just a small seed, but inside that seed is the potential to become an enormous plant that will be full of seeds for future generations of sunflowers. Every year I marvel at them and every year they do exactly what they were designed to do.
I’m also thinking about growth in humans today. The beginning of a new school year always has me thinking about and praying for all of those students, teachers, staff, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, etc, that make every school able to achieve its stated goal – the education of other people. Each year, first day of school pictures are taken and new backpacks are filled with pencils and paper and other necessities. We prayed over the backpacks and purses and other items over the last couple of weeks, putting our hopes and dreams into their hopes and dreams. Education helps to stretch people to new heights through encountering new ideas that challenge their preconceived notions of how the world works. Each year the students start small and grow beyond our imagining – just like those sunflowers in my garden.
The only way we can continue to grow and develop is if we change. We can’t stay in our place as a tiny seed – we need to be planted and watered and cared for in order to reach our full potential. Along those lines, writer C. JoyBell C. shares this thought…“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself!”
The blessed assurance that we have as beloved children of God is that God wants us to grow into the people that God gifted us to be. This will take us throwing ourselves into different situations – just like we did every year on that first day of school. Each year we grew in height, knowledge and experience – sometimes our brains and bodies hurt because they were growing so fast. When we become adults, we forget sometimes that we need to keep growing, learning and changing through exposure to new ideas, new people, new situations. The “same old, same old” does not lead to growth, it limits what we can become and blunts our potential growth.
The same is true for our spiritual selves. God expects that we will continue to grow in our faith and our understanding of God, other people and cultures, and of other religious views. The abundant life that Jesus promised us comes when we continue to grow in our faith and grow towards the mind and heart of Jesus. The abundant life and the truth of the gospel only come to us when we are exposed to the fullness of that gospel and grow in love for God and our neighbors.
You may be thinking that you are stuck, that your life is in a rut or that you are not living up to your potential. If so, then I invite you to be like you were on the first day of school and expose yourself to some new experiences. One of those could be walking into a faith community this weekend. There you will meet others who are trying to grow, to learn, to expose themselves to the love of God and thus to change from seed into a magnificent plant. You all have that potential. I look forward to seeing your growth in our community. Blessings for your journey!