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!
Believing
Believing…it is a word that has many different meanings yet is one of the most important words in all of the Dictionary for how we live our lives. Afterall, we start out as youngsters spending a lot of our time in our imaginations – in a world we create of “make believe”. We make believe that we are adults like our parents (in fact, we often dress up and mimic their behaviors). We make believe that we are superheroes, firefighters and police officers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, bankers, etc. We pretend to be these characters and try to embody some of their finer attributes. Sooner or later, however, we stop playing at “make believe” and begin our everyday lives hopefully believing in someone or something larger than ourselves.
No matter how old we are, we find ourselves interacting with the world and learning how to discern who to trust and who to believe. We begin by trusting and believing in our parents and family members, our teachers and coaches, our pastors and Sunday School teachers, doctors and nurses, and other responsible adults. We begin by trusting them and believing what they tell us about how to behave and how to be in the world.
Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin has this truth to share about how we come to understand believing: “People don't believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.” As a person who has lived many decades, I can believe what Mr. Godin says here because I have experienced it. There are a lot of good people all over our world who mostly believe what they tell themselves, or what some internet influencer or popular person says, irrespective of what is actually true.
Believing is an important part of our faith journey as well. We have a myriad of things spiritual in which we can believe. There are many different faiths with wide ranging belief systems and doctrines. In Christianity alone, there are some 40,000 different groups who claim to follow Jesus and his teachings. Some of us have grown up believing in the religion of our parents, only to find that as we grew up that that doctrine did not “work” for us. We probably shopped around a bit, many left organized religion for a time or some have left for good. Those who kept at it found their way to a set of beliefs that they could accept and adopt. Something that helped them in believing that there is something wiser and more powerful than they are that is control of all that is.
The blessed assurance that we have as beloved children of God is that God continues to come to us in ways that we can find believable. God comes as people who help us out, as folks who offer us ways to be helpful to others, as trusted friends and confidants who conduct themselves in ways that we find believable. Believing in them, especially when they point us to the One who is most to be believed, is where we discover our faith and the truth that God never stops believing in us – no matter how much we struggle to believe in God.
Believing in something we cannot see or touch is challenging. Jesus said to Thomas that “blessed are those who do not see and yet believe”. Yet, God continues to help our believing by bringing us into contact with trustworthy people. If you are having difficulty believing in God, then I invite you to a faith community this week. There you will find folks believing in the best in other people – even when those folks disappoint them and believing that God is ultimately in control. They discover together that believing in the goodness of God is what makes life together possible. It is difficult to believe other humans at times. I invite you to come and discover believing in God. It may take some time, but the journey toward believing is one that contains many blessings. May God bless your journey toward believing this week!