Hospitality: Areas That Are Effective in Creating a Desire for a Visitor to Connect to Our Redeemer Lutheran Church

This major applied project explores hospitality offered by the local congregation. Biblical hospitality is implicitly and explicitly commanded in scripture. Balancing the Missio Dei and two kinds of righteousness will keep us on the straight and narrow theologically when pursuing hospitality. When churches offer hospitality, we are feeding, clothing, visiting, providing, and welcoming our neighbor. Our Redeemer wants to continue serving the community as a family-oriented, mission focused, hospitable congregation. We are doing the feeding, clothing, and providing through many efforts in the community. We are active with the local homeless shelter and crisis center. For the MAP, we wanted to discover what areas of hospitality are effective in creating a desire for visitors to have a further connection to the congregation. Through this particular study, we want to better understand our hospitality of welcoming and visiting. Both secular and sacred sources are explored as resources. To offer hospitality means preparation on our part. Secret shoppers were utilized to measure the effectiveness of Our Redeemer’s hospitality. Through secret visits by individuals that fit the prescribed criteria and follow-up personal interviews, an image of Our Redeemer’s friendliness and expression of hospitality has been formed. As a result of this MAP the congregation will address facility issues and continually build a culture of hospitality. At Our Redeemer, we are about “Equipping Disciples to Make Disciples for Jesus!” Since that is true, it can be said that at Our Redeemer, we are about hospitality! As Christians, we all need to practice hospitality

Life-Course Genome-wide Association Study Meta-analysis of Total Body BMD and Assessment of Age-Specific Effects.

Bone mineral density (BMD) assessed by DXA is used to evaluate bone health. In children, total body (TB) measurements are commonly used; in older individuals, BMD at the lumbar spine (LS) and femoral neck (FN) is used to diagnose osteoporosis. To date, genetic variants in more than 60 loci have been identified as associated with BMD. To investigate the genetic determinants of TB-BMD variation along the life course and test for age-specific effects, we performed a meta-analysis of 30 genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of TB-BMD including 66,628 individuals overall and divided across five age strata, each spanning 15 years. We identified variants associated with TB-BMD at 80 loci, of which 36 have not been previously identified; overall, they explain approximately 10% of the TB-BMD variance when combining all age groups and influence the risk of fracture. Pathway and enrichment analysis of the association signals showed clustering within gene sets implicated in the regulation of cell growth and SMAD proteins, overexpressed in the musculoskeletal system, and enriched in enhancer and promoter regions. These findings reveal TB-BMD as a relevant trait for genetic studies of osteoporosis, enabling the identification of variants and pathways influencing different bone compartments. Only variants in ESR1 and close proximity to RANKL showed a clear effect dependency on age. This most likely indicates that the majority of genetic variants identified influence BMD early in life and that their effect can be captured throughout the life course