Church or congregation, that is the question. A group at the Community Church of New York, situated at 40 E. 35th St., has been examining a proposal to change the name from the Community Church of New York to the Community Congregation of New York.

At this broadly ecumenical liberal congregation in Murray Hill, the role of the nonconformist is virtually sacerdotal.

Each Unitarian Universalist congregation makes its own decisions, as they are self-governing. The denomination affirms individual belief and personal conscience.

The information officer at Unitarian Universalist Association, Janet Hayes, said UUA was a bottom-up denomination, and each individual congregation was self-governing, and usually called church, fellowship, or congregation. She said for a congregation to debate changing its name was “healthy.”

“It shows they’re committed to revitalizing their mission,” she said.

The mid-century Scandinavian modern interior of the Community Church displays bronze busts of figures such as Gandhi, Schweitzer, Emerson, Margaret Sanger, and Martin Luther King Jr. The pews do not contain bibles but hymnals. Banners of world religions hang inside. The outside façade features Isaiah breaking a sword into a ploughshare. The church celebrates solstice, Chanukah, and Diwali, a Hindu holiday. Weekly worship services are held Sunday mornings at 11. The Metropolitan Synagogue meets in its building and has borrowed its shofar from the church.

Why “congregation” instead of church? “The initials are the same. CCNY,” notes a proposal written last January, where member Howard Ostwind was listed as forming discussion groups to discuss the matter. The term “congregation” is more “inclusive,” he told the Sun. The proposal says, “Congregation has some spiritual overtones, but it can also be secular, and it doesn’t specify only one religion, as many people feel church does. We feel congregation is a better reflection of who and what we are now: a diverse, spiritual, open, community.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the recent proposal to change our name from The Community Church,” wrote Senior Minister Bruce Southworth in their weekly newsletter in March. The minister, whose services are broadcast on television and radio, continued in that newsletter, “Our name – because of what we stand for and do – is well-known and acclaimed.” He continued, “I am at home with the word ‘church.’ Yet, I do have some understanding and awareness of the feelings of those who seek to change our name and avoid calling us a church.” He acknowledged that for some, the word church caused “discomfort.”

“We aren’t the first church to have this conversation,” he wrote. He added, “I also often intentionally use the words congregation and community in writing or speaking, knowing for some it is more inclusive, even though I also embrace our identity as a church.”

The church has a distinguished history and famous speakers over the years have included Norman Thomas, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Roy Wilkins, Will Durant, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Nelson Mandela, Dwight Macdonald, and Daniel Berrigan, as well as Malcolm X in debate with Bayard Rustin.

Favoring keeping the name church, member Robert Reiss said, “The history of this congregation is decidedly within the Protestant-enlightenment tradition, and as such, is a church, notwithstanding its ethos of secular humanism.” He added that far from de-Christianizing the name, calling it “congregation” may confuse people into thinking it is part of the Congregational denomination. A former minister of the church, George Hepworth, resigned from Unitarianism in 1872 to became a Congregational minister, taking members with him.

Embodying the church’s maverick spirit, one of its leaders, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, was an activist for social reform in New York in the first half of the century. He wrote, “We revolutionized this church by changing its names, freeing its pews, democratizing its organization, cleansing its covenant of all Unitarian and even Christian implications, and thus took the first steps toward making it a community as contrasted with a sectarian institution of religion.”

Holmes had hopes for ” a universal, humanistic religion which knows no bounds of any kind, not even Christianity,” according to a 1964 book about him by Carl Hermann Voss. His successor, Rev. Donald Harrington, once sermonized that in affirming universal truths, “We are not less than Christian, but more!”

Would a move away from the word “church” untether its humanism further from religious underpinnings? The senior leader at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Tony Hileman, distinguished Unitarian congregations from Ethical Culture societies in that “Ethical culture does not concern itself with questions of ultimacy. We set these aside in favor of cooperation and an enhancement of this life.” He said both are very open and welcome people with different worldviews.

“We’re a Christian-derived denomination. I would not say we’re a Christian denomination,” said the council chair of the Community Church of New York, Peter Robinson, who said CCNY contains humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others. He said there’s a feeling among some members that the word church “distracts from what we do nowadays and that it reflects more our past than our future.” The board has asked that that the church’s 294 members be polled to see what support there actually is for a change. “We’re testing the winds at this point,” said council member Lisa Gluck.