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!
What Do You Want to Be?
The title of this piece asks a question that we have all been asked at one time or another in our lives – what do we want to be (most often, who or what do you want to be when you grow up)? What is it that we understand ourselves to be uniquely gifted and called to do in the world? I suspect that most of us went through many ideas of who or what we wanted to be. I ran through the usual boy picks like fireman, policeman, cowboy, center fielder for the Yankees, movie star, rock-and roll lead singer to name the choices that lasted for a while. The thing I told people that I wanted to be when I grew up was a physician, and from the time I was about 10 years old, that was my answer. I even went off to college with my degree choice as Pre-Med.
However, I never did apply to Medical School and changed my major to Pre-Pharmacy after my second year in college. My dreams of what I thought I wanted to be met up with the reality that I wasn’t all that interested in becoming a physician once I began the coursework and dealt with my fellow pre-med students. Being a pharmacist was my first calling and I was very satisfied with what that training and education allowed me to do on behalf of critically ill and injured people.
It was a grand career for 28 years, but it came to an end as I realized that God was calling me to be something else in the world. God was calling me to be something other than a critical care pharmacist – God was calling me to work in God’s hospital (e.g., the Church). I would need to go back for more training and education, and I would ultimately be called to pastor multiple churches in rural Virginia. Being a church pastor was never an answer that I gave when asked what did I want to be – even after I went to seminary. I thought I would be a chaplain and probably work in a large continuing care community, in hospice or in a hospital. God wanted me to be a church pastor, however, and that’s what I’ve spent my last 8 years doing.
This calling has fulfilled my need to care for people, but to do it in a more relational way than I had been able to do as a hospital pharmacist. My responsibilities now are to guide, teach, mentor, non-judgmentally listen, and love unconditionally those people with whom I am in ministry. In many ways, this is an answer to a prayer that I never was able to voice. A prayer that many who are called to professional ministry eventually articulate. The 8th Century philosopher and Buddhist monk, Shantideva, articulated my answer in “A Prayer for All Humanity”. It reads like this: “May I be a guard for those who need protection, a guide for those on the path, a boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood. May I be a lamp in the darkness, a resting place for the weary…until all being are freed from sorrow and all are awakened.”
The blessed assurance we have as we follow the God of our understanding is that God knows what God needs us to be. We will be forever searching for that “job” until we land on what God intends. I am now happier than I’ve ever been, being a guard, guide, bridge builder, lamp, place of sanctuary for all the weary and heavy laden. If you are looking for someone like me in your life, then I invite you to a faith community this week. There you will find some of each of those things as people around you are becoming what God needs them to be. Come and discover who God wants you to be. May God bless your journey!