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Remember the nursery rhyme done with hand signs:

Here’s the church

(Interlink fingers of hands, have your thumbs straight and facing you)

... and here’s the steeple.

(Straighten both of your pointing fingers)

Open the door,

(Spread your palms apart)

... and see all the people.

(Wiggle your fingers)

This is the premise behind the “Walk Thru the Bible” seminar, an interactive weekend program that helps participants grasp the meaning of the Bible by arranging main characters, events and places in a historic and geographic order from the books of the Old Testament.

It uses 77 teaching points, done with hand signals similar to the nursery rhyme.

“At the end of the day, they can recall from memory, in three minutes or less,” said the Rev. Terry Seamon, a former church pastor and the instructor for the “Old Testament Walk” at Providence Baptist Church on April 25 and 26. The seminar is open to the public and is one of half a dozen such courses in the state in the past two months.

“In Sunday school the next day, there were people raving over this,” said Teresa Meriwether, a member of Triangle Presbyterian Church in Durham, which hosted the seminar a few weekends ago.

“Walk Thru the Bible” is a Christian educational organization based in Atlanta, whose mission is to spread Christianity around the world.

“You have to understand his faith in order to understand how Jesus bridged the gap between his Jewish roots and Christianity,” said the Rev. Howard Chubbs, the pastor at Providence.

The seminars are to help people understand what they are reading — in a fun way.

“I think it’s Barna (a research organization) that has done a recent study and found that only 11 percent of Christians read their Bible regularly, and that’s alarming enough, but couple that with 'regular’ as being even once a month, and that statistic scares us,” Seamon said of the company’s research data.

At the end of the seminar, participants are asked to make a commitment to read the Bible regularly for 30 days, and there’s a reason for this, he says.

“We hope and pray we are a launching pad the pastor can build on as he disciples his church — by getting people in the word of God daily,” Seamon said.

Portions of some previous classes have been put on YouTube (go to YouTube.com and put “Walk Thru Bible” in the search field) — with laughter as a thread that joins them all.

“The style of learning is so much my style,” Seamon said. “I did OK in school, but a sit-down-and-listen lecture just wasn’t my learning style. To move and have humor and to interact and not have to sit and listen to a lecture, is my style of learning. As I travel, I find that it’s not just my style — so many people appreciate this.”

Seamon admits it takes about 15 minutes to get over the awkwardness of “I feel silly doing these hand movements.” But, he says, everybody else is doing it at the same time.

Also, participants who aren’t avid readers of the Bible should not feel out of place, he said.

“When I teach a seminar, I open my Bible once or twice to read a verse or two, because we are not studying a particular passage, because we are doing all 39 books of the Old Testament in five hours — as a friend of mine says, we’re water skiing over the top, not scuba diving.

“Someone who wants to understand how the Bible fits together and God’s major message can understand this without ever having read the Bible.”

Those who are more familiar with the Bible walk away with another lesson, by getting a framework of where those pieces fit, Seamon said. The others walk away with a framework they can fill in as they read more of the Bible.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com