WASHINGTON — Escalating its courtship of a politically powerful constituency, the Bush administration is teaming up with some of the nation's best-known and most-influential black clergy to craft a new role for U.S. churches in Africa.

The effort was launched in mid-May when more than two dozen leading black religious figures met privately with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials at the State Department, according to administration officials and meeting participants.

The hourlong session focused largely on how the Bush administration's faith-based initiative could be expanded to combat the spread of HIV and provide help for millions of children orphaned by the epidemic across Africa. Some of the pastors said it was a matter of national security — that those orphans were susceptible to recruitment by Islamic extremists unless they could be exposed to black Christian churches.

The gathering yielded no formal financial commitment from the federal government for the Africa effort. But participants said it marked a new era of engagement by black clergy with U.S. foreign policy.

The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., and a longtime Republican, said Rice's decision to meet with the pastors gave them a "mandate" to craft Africa policy. He said the group has laid plans to meet again soon with State Department officials.

A senior aide to Rice, James Wilkinson, said the meeting reflected Rice's belief that more black organizations "need to get involved in the president's Africa agenda."

If it goes forward, the collaboration could result in a substantial expansion of black church participation in the faith-based initiative, from a largely domestic focus to a broader overseas portfolio that pastors believe could make hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars available for black church work combating AIDS and related social ills. Rice and the pastors discussed the possibility of establishing an office of faith-based initiatives within the State Department that would direct federal money for overseas aid to church and community groups, as similar offices have done in other Cabinet agencies.

The meeting reflected the expanding relationship between some of the country's best-known black clergy and the Bush administration.

Illustrating the political benefit of that relationship, White House officials injected some Capitol Hill strategy into the session. They solicited support among the black pastors for controversial legislation that would allow religious charities in the United States to discriminate in hiring based on an applicant's religious beliefs, a provision that has spurred opposition from some Democrats and civil-rights groups.

"Compassion has a way of cutting across partisan lines," said James Towey, the top White House official in charge of the faith-based programs, who asked the pastors to sign a letter endorsing the legislation.

But rather than lowering partisan suspicions, the meeting raised them. The high-level session occurred on the same day that the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus conducted a long-planned outreach meeting with 200 black pastors from across the country seeking to solidify bonds between the Democrats and religious leaders. Some saw the State Department meeting as an effort to upstage the caucus.

While past White House meetings drew mostly Republican-leaning pastors, the State Department session was broader, drawing longtime Democrats such as Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador, and administration critics such as the Rev. William Shaw, the head of the National Baptist Convention. The meeting was dominated, however, by Pentecostal pastors — many of them, such as Bishops T.D. Jakes of Dallas and Charles Blake of Los Angeles, known to national television audiences.

White House strategists view black ministers as a path into a voter bloc that has traditionally been Democratic but is conservative on social concerns such as abortion, school vouchers and gay marriage.

A relatively small group of sympathetic pastors has enjoyed extraordinary access to Bush and his top aides. Now, as the GOP outreach grows wider and more aggressive, some Democrats accuse the White House of expanding the promise of government grants to woo political support.

"I am concerned that this may be another enticement offered by the administration to African-American clergy along the lines of the faith-based initiative," said Rep. Major Owens, D-N.Y., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Sending U.S. grants to well-established religious charities in Africa such as Catholic Relief Services is nothing new. But one former diplomat who handled Africa policy under President Clinton expressed concern about an initiative that might favor denominations that were politically friendly to the administration.

"There is a huge pressing need for care for AIDS orphans," said Susan Rice, now a senior fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Noting that past high-level meetings had been dominated by black church denominations sympathetic to the White House, she said, "It's important to involve mainline African-American denominations ... so that the effort is not viewed solely as an effort at Republican Party base building."

The new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Kenneth Mehlman, maintains a heavy schedule of meetings with black religious and political leaders and travels nearly every week to speak at historically black colleges.

Many Democratic strategists once dismissed the Republican outreach to blacks as pandering. But they no longer wave off its potential.

Some analysts maintain that the GOP's success in boosting the black vote for Bush in Ohio last year from 9 percent to 16 percent — an increase attributed to outreach to black pastors — secured the president's re-election.