Many had never met before. Some were acquainted only from shouting at one another on television talk shows about the proper place to draw the line between church and state.
But in a series of meetings over six months, a group of 33 prominent civil libertarians, clergy members, lawyers, theologians and leaders of religious social service programs sat around a table to hammer out points of agreement on the president's proposal to expand government support to religiously based social services.
Yesterday, the group, led by former Senator Harris Wofford, a Pennsylvania Democrat, released a report recommending steps that Mr. Wofford said could lay the groundwork to advance the president's proposal, which has been stalled.
The group agreed that the government should spur charitable giving by allowing taxpayers who do not itemize their tax returns to deduct their donations to charity. The members of the group also agreed that religious groups that want to operate social service programs should form separate nonprofit organizations, and that the Internal Revenue Service should speed their applications for tax-exempt status and waive the related fees.
The group's report also recommended that private foundations and corporations consider dropping restrictions they might have on giving money to religious programs.
But the group members were unable to find agreement on the sticky issues that have mired President Bush's proposal in controversy from the start: whether tax dollars should be used for social service programs where religion is a fundamental element, and whether charities that receive government financing should be allowed to discriminate along religious lines in hiring.
"There were definitely issues on which we were too far apart to reach consensus," Mr. Wofford said in an interview. "But if you were running a faith-based organization or charity, and all the things we proposed were actually implemented, it would mean a dramatic expansion of what your organization could do."
One participant, Kevin J. Seamus Hasson, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a legal advocate for religious groups, said: "The religious side of the house wanted to say in the employment dispute, `Let us retain our institutional integrity and hire people who are our fellow believers.' The secular side of the house said: `This is employment discrimination, that's a bad thing, and for the government to fund it is even worse.' We didn't solve that controversy."
The group was convened last summer at the request of Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, who with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, is sponsoring legislation to advance the president's initiative. To lead the effort, Mr. Santorum tapped his former rival for the Pennsylvania Senate seat, Mr. Wofford, whom Mr. Santorum defeated in 1994.
Both men shared concern that the goal of a large infusion of assistance to programs serving the poor and needy had become sidetracked in the debate over church-state issues.
Members of the group ranged from leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union to religious programs led by Roman Catholics, Baptists and African-Americans.
Their report indicates that the pieces of Mr. Bush's proposal most likely to survive are those that stimulate private giving to charities - not direct government financing.
"It shows that the blueprint that Senator Lieberman and I put together is one that really has very little ideological division," Mr. Santorum said in an interview.
But some questioned whether the effort had produced anything new.
"I don't think there is any huge breakthrough here," said Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, who did not participate in the group but has supported the president's initiative.