A year after NATO forces bombed Serbia for its ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians, Serbian evangelical churches are embracing ethnic diversity and restarting relief efforts.

The Christian Evangelistic Center—a small Bible school in the village of Backi Petrovac near Novi Sad in Serbia's northern province of Voyvodina—prides itself on enrolling nearly as many different nationalities as students.

Similar to the territories of the former Yugoslavia, however, Serbia's evangelical churches would rather remain small and independent than large and unified.

The Evangelical Alliance, which formed during the past decade, hopes to overcome the disorder and provide evangelical groups with a unified voice.

But the Protestant Evangelical Church—the largest Pentecostal denomination in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, claiming to represent 11,000 believers—remains distant. An evangelical women's organization recently quit the alliance.

Though the NATO bombings from March to June 1999 helped close the evangelical ranks within Serbia, they also precipitated a trying ordeal in Orthodox-evangelical relations. Mobs damaged evangelical property in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Nis. Theologians relying on geopolitics perceived the NATO intervention as an attack of aggressive Protestantism on Orthodoxy.

Before the visit of Jesse Jackson last May, Belgrade Baptists wrote a desperate, rambling letter to the international Baptist community begging for increased moral and political support.

Despite the trials of 1999, an ethnic Hungarian relief official believes Serbia is still far removed from a national catharsis.

Some leaders have suggested that the German church's 1945 Stuttgart Declaration, in which evangelicals ...