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!
Zero-Sum
We live in a world that defines itself on the basis of “winners” and “losers”. Don’t agree? Let’s examine how most of our minds and lives operate. During our working lives, we compete for jobs and promotions – there are only so many job openings or promotions and so there are only a few people who get those jobs or raises. The ones who get the jobs “win” and the rest “lose”. We play games – the World Series trophy is being played for right now by the Brewers and the Rays. Only one of those two teams will raise the trophy – the other will come in second place out of all the teams in baseball; they will have lost. We actually define much of our lives based on a win-lose binary, and we Americans never like to lose – we always want to be number one.
Father Richard Rohr examines this zero-sum mindset, a mindset which only allows for winners and losers. He writes, “…This game of winning and losing is a tragic way of defining reality. A zero-sum game demands losers. Surely, it isn’t true that the only way we can really ‘win’ in life is to make certain that others lose? It’s amazing how we take some kind of happy delight in this. Just look at the enthusiasm communities have for their sports teams! We like that framing of reality. At this point in our history, we like winners and losers so much that, whereas Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore, I am,’ the American mind now says, ‘I win, therefore, I am.’ That is not an exaggeration. ‘I win, therefore, I am’ is at work in our economics, politics, global policy, social media, religion, and even our personal relationships! We’re not considering the other side of that equation: Whenever we think that way, there have to be losers.
Christianity quickly adopted that interpretation of the gospel, though the four Gospels in no way validated it. After several centuries of persecution by the Roman Empire, most Christians felt quite happy, excited, and even liberated when the Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity the established religion in 313 CE. We moved from the bottom to the top, from the losers to the ultimate winners….”
That role as “ultimate winners” among all the other religions has caused nothing but problems. Zero-sum problems like forced conversions, pogroms, religious wars, the Inquisition, the Crusades, indigenous school indoctrinations, religious colonization and Empire building, to name just the most egregious. The blessed assurance that we have as beloved children of God is that zero-sum is not God’s strategy for salvation (aka healing) of us and our world. Instead, the gospel (aka the “good news”) of Jesus is that with God it is always “win-win”. God’s love for us is unconditional and transformative – it helps us to grow in love for God and for all of our neighbors. We can never lose with God – we can ignore God, we can follow other lesser gods of our own making, we can decide that there is no God – but God never abandons us.
Isn’t that good news?! In a world that operates with winners and losers, it is nice to know that there is somewhere to turn for an alternative view. Nothing could be more healing for all of us who have ever lost at something than to hear that there is a place where we are forgiven, free, abundantly loved and supported. That place is our lives once we let our win-win God in.
You may be as tired of living in a zero-sum as I am. If so, I want take this moment to invite you to come to a faith community this week. There you will find people operating with a different mindset. There you will find people who know that there is so much more to life than win-lose; a life that is abundant and fulfilling. A place where we can all hear that there is an opportunity to live in the kingdom of God right now – that heaven has come near. A world where win-win is the only game in town, and that everyone has a place at the table. If you are looking for an alternative to zero-sum, then I offer you a relationship with our unconditionally loving God. Blessings for your journey.