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But the undercurrents of the debate — a drop in participation in the Scouts over the last decade and a deep division between conservative and liberal church groups over the proposal — are raising the stakes even higher for the vote as a kind of proxy on the question of how scouting stays relevant in a changing social climate, Scout volunteers involved in the discussions said.

The strains on the historic youth organization were evident, and visible. At the organization's national headquarters, also here in Irving, supporters of eliminating the ban dropped off petitions that they said had been signed by 1.4 million people. During the weekend, President Obama, in an interview, said he favored allowing gay youths to join the Scouts, while Gov. Rick Perry of Texas expressed the opposite opinion.

Two members of the Boy Scouts of America board, Randall L. Stephenson, the chairman and chief executive of AT&T, and James S. Turley, the chairman and chief executive of Ernst & Young, have already said they supported changing the policy to allow gay scouts.

At the site of the meeting, a hotel near Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, reporters were directed to a parking lot that had been cordoned off specifically for them, then barred entry into the hotel.

People on both sides of the issue said that the question of how religious groups regard the proposed policy change is crucial because of the large role that faith-based organizations play in scouting. The Scouts organization says that more than 69.4 percent of all Scout units are chartered to faith-based organizations, and more than 39 percent of scouts are involved in scouting groups affiliated with the largest three religious backers — the Mormon Church, the United Methodist Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

And while some churches have said in the past they might withdraw from participation if the gay ban was lifted, others are wading into the debate on the other side. The National Jewish Committee on Scouting, for example, one of the nation's oldest faith-based scouting sponsors, dating back to the 1920s, with upward of 40,000 volunteers, polled its leaders on Sunday in a teleconference and arrived here with a resolution to push for abandoning the gay ban.

"The proposed change is a good thing for scouting and a good thing for young men and women," the committee's chairman, A. J. Kreimer, said in an interview.

A representative of the group, Rabbi Peter E. Hyman, who is also the chairman of the Boy Scouts' Messengers of Peace initiative, which works to ease conflicts around the world, said he planned to present the National Jewish Committee's statement at the meeting.

Declining numbers of scouts are driving a related discussion about how scouting can stay relevant in a changing world, Rabbi Hyman and other officials said.

Since 2000, the number of young people involved in scouting has fallen by close to 19 percent, according to the Boy Scouts of America's most recent figures, from 2011. The number of boys in the youngest cohort of membership, the Cub Scouts, was down more than 25 percent, marking an even more alarming portent for the future.

Whether the national organization's policy on gays and lesbians has much, if anything, to do with that decline is unknown. According to a study last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Americans are also more likely than in the past to identify themselves as unaffiliated with any religion — with young people leading that trend.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors more Scout troops than any other church, has deferred comment on the proposed change. But even if gay scouts were allowed into Mormon-sponsored troops, the same church membership rules would apply as they do now, a church spokesman said.

Gay and lesbian Mormons are welcomed into the church, the spokesman said, but must follow the same rules as heterosexual Mormons. That means no sex outside marriage, and in Mormon doctrine, same-sex marriage is not recognized as legitimate — even in states where it is legal.

On Monday, Jon Langbert, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who lives in University Park, near Dallas, with the triplets he and his partner at the time had by surrogate, recalled a time in 2010 when he was a volunteer leader of fund-raising and was, he said, "fired" by the Scouts for being gay. They even told him he could no longer wear the Scout leader's shirt the pack had given him the year before. It began, he said, when his son Carter, then in the third grade, was in a Cub Scout pack that needed a "popcorn kernel" — the Scouts' name for a person who does fund-raising.

Mr. Langbert says the pack sold popcorn — and raised three times as much money as the previous year.

"They asked me to do it again the next year," Mr. Langbert said. "Then, another father said a gay guy couldn't run their fund-raising."

The national office later issued an edict that agreed with the other father, Mr. Langbert said: no fund-raising by a gay man would be allowed.