Before The Holy Knight Saga became a superhero adventure, part of the vision was a year of children’s teaching. I was working toward a curriculum built around knowing God—His character, the life of Jesus, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Looking back through those notes, I can see how much more was there than a list of lessons. There were plans for small groups, skits, games, crafts, testimonies, and conversations. There was also a question that kept pushing the whole project forward: what would help a child carry faith beyond the classroom?

The original teaching vision developed toward Crusader. The form changed, but the desire to help children and families walk with God remained.

The Question Behind the Curriculum

In the earliest outline, I asked people to think about what they remembered from childhood. Could they name their kindergarten teacher? Could they remember what that teacher taught on the second day of class? How much of an ordinary school day remained with them years later?

Then I asked a different set of questions. When did God become real to them? Who helped them come to faith? What encounter with Him had stayed with them?

I was trying to describe the difference between hearing information and carrying something that has become personally meaningful. Facts and understanding matter. I also wanted children to hear accounts of God at work in ways that could become part of their own growing relationship with Him.

In the notes, I used the words “instructing” and “imparting” to express that concern. I wanted our preparation to include prayer about the child receiving the lesson, as well as care over the lesson itself.

Why Memorial Stones Mattered

Joshua 4 was central to the idea. The stones taken from the Jordan were a memorial that would prompt children to ask what had happened. Their questions would give adults a reason to tell the story of what God had done.

That picture gave me a way to think about testimony. A child might not have lived through an event personally, but hearing it told could help them understand the faith of the people around them. Remembering could lead to a conversation, and that conversation could become part of the child’s own foundation.

I began speaking of those remembered accounts as living stones being built within a person. It was a teaching picture for the way God’s Word and the testimonies of His work could become points of remembrance when someone faced a new challenge.

I did not want children merely to be able to repeat that God was good. I wanted them to have stories, experiences, and words they could return to when they needed to trust Him.

Twelve Themes for a Year of Learning

By May 2020, the notes described a year of children’s teaching on salvation through the character and nature of God. The outline used twelve themes, grouped around the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

The headings and examples continued to change. A later breakdown, recorded in May 2022, made the structure more concrete. Each main theme had several possible lesson points beneath it, giving the larger vision the beginnings of a teaching sequence.

Knowing the Father

The first four themes were God’s love, goodness, righteousness, and holiness.

Love began with the breadth of God’s love and then brought it close: God loves everyone, and God loves you. The later notes included the thought that God did not want to contain His love, a way of opening a conversation about creation and relationship.

Goodness connected the goodness of creation to the child hearing the lesson. God made the world. God made people. God made you. I wanted the child to hear that their life had value, rather than seeing themselves as an accident or a mistake.

Righteousness was described in language a child could approach: God acts in a right way, tells the truth, and helps us understand how to live. The Ten Commandments were one of the familiar biblical accounts considered for that section.

Holiness used the picture of purity and bright light to help children begin thinking about God’s character. The aim was to introduce the meaning of a large biblical word through language that could lead into further questions and understanding.

Meeting Jesus Through His Life

The next four themes were humility, compassion, obedience, and Jesus as the Lamb.

Humility included Jesus coming to live among us, His baptism, and His relationship with His mother in John 2. Those accounts offered a way to explore humility through what Jesus actually did.

Compassion was described in the notes as love in action. Jesus healing, freeing, and caring for people would help give that phrase a recognizable shape. The question for a child could then become how love might be put into action in their own relationships.

Obedience drew attention to Jesus speaking and doing what the Father gave Him to say and do. The lesson ideas moved toward the cost of that obedience and the love shown at the cross.

Jesus as the Lamb brought the sequence to His sacrifice and resurrection. In the later outline, the emphasis included the debt of sin, the suffering He endured in love, and His victory over death.

The purpose was to help children see these accounts as connected. Creation, God’s character, Jesus’ life, and salvation belonged within a larger story, rather than becoming unrelated lessons remembered only until the next activity.

Learning About the Holy Spirit

The final group of themes went through the clearest change in wording between versions.

Earlier outlines used conviction, faith, comfort, and help. By May 2022, the headings had become convincing, guiding, comforting, and helping. The revision reflects the work of finding language that could make the themes clearer for the intended audience.

The convincing section included awareness of sin, revelation of God, illumination of truth, and being drawn toward Him. The guiding section included belonging to God, learning truth and wisdom, and being changed in the way we live.

Comforting moved into experiences a child could begin to recognize: peace, encouragement, the fruit of the Spirit, and help when thoughts say that they are unworthy or unloved. Helping included spiritual gifts, understanding Scripture, and recognizing the Holy Spirit’s work in everyday life.

These were working teaching notes. They show the subjects I wanted to explore, together with language I was still refining, rather than a completed curriculum that had already been produced and tested.

What a Lesson Could Look Like

The plan named six parts of the teaching experience:

• A main lesson introducing the central idea.
• An age-appropriate small-group lesson.
• Small-group discussion.
• A skit.
• A game.
• A craft.

I wanted more than one way for a child to engage. A story might open the conversation. A question might show what a child had understood—or what they were still wondering. A skit could let them see a choice acted out. A game or craft could give them another way to remember the lesson afterward.

The early classroom notes also recognized a practical challenge: children of different ages need different ways into the material. There were discussions about class groupings and occasions when a child needed to move into another age group. That made age-appropriate teaching a real concern rather than simply a phrase in the plan.

The shared subject could remain the same while the conversation, activity, and expectations changed for the children receiving it.

Testimonies Alongside Teaching

Another version of the plan proposed three audio pieces each week: a lesson, a testimony, and a “tapestry” installment. The archive preserves those proposed strands, although it does not give a finished description of every installment.

What is clear is that testimony was meant to sit alongside the lesson. I wanted children to hear about God’s character and also hear what it looked like when someone trusted Him in an ordinary life.

That returns to the memorial-stone picture. The account of what God had done could become something a child remembered and asked about. Adults could share the reasons behind their faith instead of assuming children would somehow absorb those reasons without a conversation.

Preparing to Build Into Children

The earliest planning material repeatedly returned to the people teaching the children. I wanted the vision to affect how we prepared, how we prayed, and how we regarded the time we had with them.

Every child mattered. Every lesson deserved attention. A classroom could offer a place for questions, encouragement, and the beginning of a deeper understanding of God.

The aim was not to make a child’s faith depend upon an impressive activity or a teacher’s performance. I wanted the whole experience to point beyond the lesson itself, toward knowing God and learning to walk with Him.

How the Vision Moved Toward Crusader

The year-long curriculum was an early form of something that continued developing. As I have looked back at it, I recognize its place in the road toward Crusader and The Holy Knight Saga.

A superhero story has a different form from a classroom lesson. It gives us characters to know, relationships to follow, choices to weigh, and consequences to discover. It can create a reason for a reader to ask what they would do, why someone acted as they did, or where hope comes from when things become difficult.

That is another way to invite a family into a meaningful conversation. The adventure has to work as an adventure, while the characters’ lives can open room to explore faith, compassion, courage, obedience, and trust.

The archive does not supply a date for every step between the curriculum and Crusader. The connection is part of how I now understand the development of the vision. The old outlines preserve an earlier stage of it.

The Book Is Connected, and Separate

Altars of Living Stones: Building a Testimony belongs to the wider vision, but it is a separate book project. Its connection is the importance of remembering and sharing what God has done.

The year of children’s teaching, the testimony book, and the later superhero story should each be allowed their own history and purpose. Their relationship does not make them the same product, or mean that the classroom curriculum was simply an early edition of the book.

They show different ways that a concern can take creative form: helping people remember God’s work, know Him more deeply, and carry faith into the life in front of them.

Why I Am Keeping These Early Pages

An outline can look small compared with the thing it eventually helps produce. These notes are lists of themes, lesson ideas, questions, and possible activities. Yet together they help me remember what I was trying to build into the lives of children and families.

The questions are still meaningful to me. What are children learning about God from what we say? What are they learning from how we live? What stories are we passing on that might help them trust Him when they face something new?

The form of the project has changed over time. I am thankful that these pages preserve the heart of an earlier stage, and help me see its connection to the story still being developed.

This feature draws on curriculum notes recorded on October 20, 2019; May 9, 2020; and May 19, 2022. Patrick clarified the curriculum’s development toward Crusader in November 2026. The plans are presented as creative history, not as an announcement of a currently available curriculum.