(Read other responses to this month’s Coffee Hour topic.) No doubt you’ve heard the old joke. What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian Universalist? Answer: A knock at the door for no reason.

It ain’t easy saying what you are when what you are is a Unitarian Univeralist. No one knows what it is. And the name don’t help. If I take the time to say the whole name—U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sa-list—people do seem to be less afraid that we’re some sort of fruity fringe group (even as they pity me for being out of breath). If I mention Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the next (winded) breath, they seem more at ease, if still confused.

UUs need a new name. Like Will Shetterly said, “UU” speaks of merger in a way not dissimilar to AOL-TimeWarner? It’s true. Back in the late 1960s, the Unitarians and the Univeralists—two heretical sects of the Protestant left—merged into one organization (as all good ecumenists were wont to do back then).

But the name doesn’t really, I don’t know, communicate. But absent a winning moniker, I’ll restrain myself to shotgun commentary on some of the suggested options and on what a winning name should or shouldn’t do.

1. “UU” fails the syllable test–whether it’s three, five or however many syllables. Ten is just too many.

2. No one knows what “unitarian” or a “universalist” means. (True, no one knows what “Presbyterian” or “Methodist” means either, but they’re familiar enough with much larger denominations to not worry about it. And anybody can figure out what “Baptists” do. And all of them much larger than UU, so advertising won’t fix the name recognition issue.) Combining “U” and “U” made political sense forty years ago, but it’s confusing now.

3. “UU” also fails the famous founder test. Baptists are named after John the Baptist (some 1.6 millennia after the fact). Lutherans are named after Martin Luther. Calvinists after John Calvin. It would seem that if we went with the famous founder approach, our best best would be “Emersonian.” Most folks ran into Ralph Waldo Emerson in high school English class, so we’d get some name recognition out of it. (“Parkerism” and “Ballouism” just don’t do it for me.) Sure, “Emersonian” is off by a century if you’re counting from the merger, but if Baptists can get away with 1600 years, who’s to say we can’t fudge a little ourselves?

4. Other suggestions fall under the form of “church/assembly/congregation/community of…” Here we encounter the question of ecclesiology. “Congregation” carries a hefty Christian and Jewish meaning, without the overt Christian baggage of “church.” “Assembly” has good roots in New Testament Greek, but it was too overused for high school pep rallies for my taste. “Community” is always a favorite of mine, but it doesn’t connote polity the way “congregation” does. What if we used “congregations,” in the plural? That could point out our self-governing at the local level and out diversity at the same time.

5. Still other suggestions try to point out the open-minded, open-ended nature of UUism. “Seeker,” “quest,” “sacred doubt,” and so on. These names seem a good fit to my understanding of what UUism is, but they might be leaving themselves too open. “Seeking what? Doubting what? Quest for what?” folks might ask. And then we’re back where we started.