Creation and Incarnation

Snippet from article called Truth and Beauty from Spring 2006 Cutting Edge. BTW, this issue has some excellent beginning info for a church plant starting a worship team or even an established church starting a worship team... stuff on finding and forming musicians, song writing, for instance.

I think that evangelical churches have put such
an emphasis on soul-winning that they’ve ended
up with a bottom line, like a profit-and-loss statement:
“How many souls did we win this year? No
one is arguing that we should not do evangelism.
But when that’s the primary category, everything
that is not in some direct way “measurable” then
becomes suspect. “Why should we invest our time
or money and energy in those things, since we
can’t quantify the results in terms of numbers or
converts?” To which I say, ‘When God created the
earth, he made both trees that bear fruit and trees
that are good to look at.” Why? He made the earth
extravagantly beautiful, and it didn’t have to be
that way. God said it was good that way. We seem
to assume someone wrote a rule somewhere that
churches have to be ugly, with fluorescent white
lights and plain white walls. But we don’t realize
that we are communicating theological things with
the way we design our churches.