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Originally Posted by exlurker
First of all, congrats on the awards / turnaround.
Second, maybe just a minor question, or maybe you can't answer because of ritual issues: was it hard to do a "bible study" focused on your org's principles without hitting the slippery slope of actual religious beliefs / theology, etc?
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I'm an ATO, so Alpha and Omega with a cross in the middle. We aren't exclusively a Christian org, but we are based on Christian principles. We were started after the civil war to bring mankind together on the basis of commonly held judeo-christian principles, and cause everyone to believe in those things so we can unite them. So, not really a problem.
That said, we tapped Campus Crusade to run it. I know some campuses have Greek InterVarsity which might be better if it's there. You could probably use a business ethics professor if you needed to. Whatever works. I thought it was good to bring someone in from outside that had some expertise and maybe a different view about the subject areas than we as undergrads did. Opportunity to sharpen and refocus.
Anyway we have some principles stated in our ritual & 3 public principles focused on pledges. We just changed the ritual principles to synonyms, added the pledge principles, and kicked in a couple complementary words. Then told the Campus Crusade guy to do moral development sessions based on one of those words for each session. He did the non-denominational won't offend anyone version. He did make bible refs, but also talked about how something was viewed in Judaism, Islam, etc. It was a bit of a communications barrier to get across to this guys what we wanted, but once it was going it worked well.
We ended up recruiting a couple guys out of campus crusade that each later served as chaplain for the chapter - which is mostly about continuing moral leadership education for actives in our org. We also started doing habitat projects, which was run by campus crusade guys on our campus, so working side by side with those guys. Lot of cultural barrier, but good stuff to do.
Bible study, and anything specific we did, may not be the perfect answers for another org or campus. It's what worked for us. I'm mainly saying it can be done & done well while still being hard and maybe even making your chapter/members better in the process. You just have to be creative and put in some hard work.