The Coalition is under pressure from faith groups to include protections for institutions in its proposed religious discrimination bill, which is expected to go to cabinet next week.

But LGBTQI advocates say the government should resist the push, saying it would create an “extremely unorthodox” piece of legislation that differed from traditional anti-discrimination laws.

The attorney general, Christian Porter, and the prime minister, Scott Morrison, have been consulting with church groups about the proposed new laws, which were promised before the election in response to a review conducted by former MP Philip Ruddock.

Morrison quietly met with 21 leaders of Australia’s key religions in Sydney last week, promising not to rush the new laws, while assuring them he was working towards securing a “workable balance” between religious freedom and competing rights.

Guardian Australia understands Porter will take legislation to cabinet next week, after which the government is expected to release an exposure draft of the bill and begin negotiations with the Labor party.

A public consultation period is also expected.

The Australian Christian Lobby’s Dan Flynn said his group had been pushing for the government to include specific protections to ensure employment contracts could not impinge on the religious expression of employees, and said institutions also needed to be protected.

“We want more than religious belief to be protected, we are looking at religious expression and activity,” Flynn told Guardian Australia. “We are particularly concerned about what employees say outside of their employment and we think that an employer should only be able to restrict religious freedom in the workplace where it is absolutely necessary in the workplace.”

Flynn said he wanted to see explicit protections for organisations in the bill, giving the example of a church that may be denied the hiring of a school hall because of its views on traditional marriage.

“The workplace is a fair part of our focus, but we have also been putting the case that it shouldn’t just be individuals that are protected, but also entities as well.”

Equality Australia’s chief executive, Anna Brown, said the organisation was looking forward to seeing the detail of the legislation, but said she was concerned the new laws could see workplace protections for minority groups watered down.

“Of course people are already free to have water cooler conversations about all sorts of things including their religious views, but it has long been accepted that Australian workplaces need to be able to maintain safe and inclusive workplaces for all of their employees,” she said. “It’s illegal, for example, to sexually harass or bully someone even if it’s at a water cooler.

“We need to ensure that protections of people of faith operate as a shield and don’t allow them to be treated unfairly because of their beliefs, but at the same time we can’t punch a hole in other safety and discrimination laws that operate to allow workplaces to be harmonious.”

Brown said that discrimination laws across the country protected people from the harmful effects of discrimination and gave individuals a cause of action to complain about unfair treatment, but that this did not apply to organisations.

“Organisations have never been protected under discrimination laws and that would be, to use Christian Porter’s words, extremely unorthodox and inappropriate for a religious discrimination act to protect religious organisations,” she said.

“It would be extremely unorthodox for the religious discrimination bill to include provisions to protect organisations or religious institutions given the historical focus of discrimination law in protecting the rights and dignity of individuals.”

Brown said she supported the release of an exposure draft to allow all interested groups to comment on the legislation and to test the draft provisions before they went to parliament.

Michael Kellahan, the head of Christian legal thinktank Freedom for Faith, told Guardian Australia that religious discrimination was different to other forms of discrimination because it was inherently about people who “gathered together.”

“That isn’t a tricky legal argument, it’s the very nature of religious belief that people don’t have it in isolation,” he said. “It is not just an individual right, it is actually a right to gather with others, it is a right to teach children it’s a right to gather on the basis of belief.”

He said that even though there was a push from conservatives for a broader religious freedom act, a religious discrimination act that captured religious organisations would be a welcome “first step”.

“But it would be a strange result if this first piece of legislation dealt just with an individual’s rights divorced from institutional kinds of rights,” he said.