Disenculturation and Signs of Protestant Health

"In the seventeenth century, English and American Puritans gradually began to adopt the leavening strategy of the New Testament and began to pray for spiritual awakening to reshape the church and the culture by internal transformation instead of external imposition. Many Puritans and Pietists began to seek to transcend theological and denominational differences to form a union of Protestants on the basis of a common recognition of godliness in one another. The most radical of these leaders, Count Zinzendorf, consciously limited his concern in missions and ecumenism to the core of biblical teaching in the New Testament which deals with spiritual renewal and insisted that political unification or cultural homogenization of the church was useless and unnecessary. Zinzendorf discouraged legalism and fostered Christian freedom..." (Dynamics, pp. 193-94).