Madeleine L'Engle says it best:

"The only reason I can find for all the shouting about how God created is that it allows some people to stop thinking, to settle back into the safety of their rut, to stop thinking about what it is really all about.
What it is really about is that creation is God's. It is el who has made us, and not we ourselves. To argue about how God made us is to argue about non-essentials. AS far as I am concerned, it doesn't matter a whit how God created. The important thing is that creation is God's, and that we are part of it, and being part of creation is for us to be co-creators with el in the continuing joy of new creation.
That is a great calling, and when we argue about how God created us, we forget our vocation, and the tempter rejoices. I'm all for genuine scientific research, but when we argue about how rather than if or why, we miss the point. In a world where fewer and fewer people believe in God at all, where life is for so many an unimportant accident with no meaning, where we are born only to slip back into annihilation, we need to stop arguing and affirm the goodness of creation, and the power of love which holds us all."

We are called to be co-creators with the Creator himself. We are all creative, whether your creative senses are awakened by oils on a canvas, a beautiful Wagner piece, numbers on a spreadsheet, or thinking of new business strategies or architectural structures that are both ascetically pleasing and energy efficient.
What this means is that in God's "common grace" (which isn't so common after all. It is amazing in and of itself!), all of humanity (and it can be argued that all of creation) was given the gift of creating, of working with SOMETHING to make it the best that they can make it. Every human being is endowed with the ability to create. It's not JUST something that the Church can do.

In fact, in the eyes of both Christians and non-Christians alike, it's strange to see that sometimes the most gifted and talented artists that are featured are non-Christians. Why is this? Why is talent and creativity stifled so that we can teach our children that only the Bible and Jesus and defending the Bible and Jesus are the things that matter? Did not the king give his servants talents so that they could grow them and expand them in the parable that Jesus spoke? Why is pleasure something from which we would rather run away?

Now you may tell me that there ARE Christian bands and artists who have succeeded in their talents. That is true. But the non-Christian world generally dictates how the art and the music look, and the Christian world (after debate) generally follows.

I'm not saying that Christians are of little value in this world. However, I AM saying that sometimes, to serve Christ effectively and to spread the truth effectively, we must culture creativity, encouraging children to be a co-creator in this world.

Encourage imagination. Christ valued the children, even told us that we should have a child-like faith.

"I'm not going to define the creative impulse. I don't think it's definable. There are educationalists who think it can be taught like the new math and who write learned treatises on methods of teaching it. The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught." - Madeleine L'Engle

"We will not have the courage...to keep our child's creativity, unless we are willing to be truly 'grownup.' Creativity opens us to revelation, and when our high creativity is lowered to two percent, so is our capacity to see angels, to walk on water, to talk with unicorns. In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind. Something almost always happens to startle us during the act of creating, but not unless we let go our adult intellectual control and become as open as little children. This means not to set aside or discard the intellect but to understand that it is not to become a dictator, for when it does we are closed off from revelation." Madeleine L'Engle

All quotes taken from the book Herself, compiled by Carole F. Chase. Published by ShawBooks, Colorado Springs, CO. Copyright 2001.