Tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered over the weekend in Salt Lake City for a twice-annual event that some liken to a family meeting. This one happened to fall at a heavy moment for that family, which has more than 17 million members around the world.

Its president, Russell M. Nelson, died on Sept. 27. The next day, a gunman in Michigan crashed a pickup truck into a Latter-day Saints church and opened fire. The attack killed four congregants, and a blaze later consumed the church building. People who knew the gunman, who was shot and killed by the police, said he had held an angry grudge against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since the painful end to a relationship with a woman in Utah.

Just weeks earlier, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus less than an hour from Salt Lake City, putting the church’s home region at the epicenter of the national story of cultural polarization and political violence.

Multiple speakers, who are drawn from the highest levels of leadership in the church, welled up with tears as they spoke onstage and in interviews this weekend.

Elder Gary E. Stevenson was one of several speakers to refer directly to the attack in Grand Blanc, Mich., from the stage. “Our hearts are mourning loss,” Mr. Stevenson, who belongs to the second-highest leadership body in the church, told attendees on Saturday morning in a talk urging the necessity of peacemaking even in an atmosphere of violence.

The church has endured the period of mourning without an official leader. At the conference, Dallin H. Oaks, the church’s presumed next president, signaled a familiar priority for the church’s future, telling members in the final address on Sunday that they should resist national trends of declining marriage and birth rates.

“In the United States we are suffering from a deterioration in marriage and childbearing,” Mr. Oaks said. He exhorted listeners to remember “the purpose of marriage and the value of children.”

Mr. Oaks, 93, will formally assume the presidency sometime after the funeral of Mr. Nelson, who died just a week before the scheduled conference opened at a cavernous church building in downtown Salt Lake City.

The church has not announced the official timing of the transition, but a gap between leaders has not lasted longer than two weeks since the 19th century. Mr. Nelson’s public viewing will take place on Monday in the same building as the conference, and the funeral will be held here on Tuesday.

Mr. Oaks will assume leadership of the church at a moment when fraught internal conversations around gender, sexuality, the family and religious liberty have mirrored debates in the broader American culture and the courts. The Trump administration has backed policies aimed at persuading more Americans to marry and have more babies, and to have one parent stay at home with young children.

In an exchange at Utah Valley University before he was killed, Mr. Kirk praised the group he referred to as Mormons, admiring them for having large families.

But “you’ve got to get your mojo back,” he said. “No more of this L.G.B.T. stuff.”

Latter-day Saints leaders meet privately in smaller groups while they are in town for a meeting known as General Conference, but most of the proceedings from the stage were focused on spiritual edification. Choirs including the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square — formerly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — sang hymns between sermons.

Founded in New York in the 19th century, the church is headquartered in Salt Lake City because violent opposition drove early church members farther and farther west. Some who traveled to the conference said that history was on their minds this weekend.

“There’s a lot of persecution toward the church, since the beginning,” said Shelise Mayer, 40, who traveled from Eagar, Ariz., with her family of seven. “This is something that comes with being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Only 15 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Latter-day Saints, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. That is lower than the numbers for every other group in the survey, including Muslims and atheists.

Anyone is invited to attend the meeting in Salt Lake City. Attendees arrived dressed in what the church describes as “Sunday best”: skirts or dress pants for women, ties for men. Every seat in the 20,000-seat venue was filled for the five sessions on Saturday and Sunday.

During a break in the proceedings, Brian and Jilaine Thorne and their daughter, Lydia, 18, took family pictures in front of large portraits of Mr. Nelson and Mr. Oaks in the lobby. The family traveled to the meeting from Alberta, Canada, at the urging of Lydia, who had the visit on her “bucket list.”

The Thornes’ home church was destroyed by an arsonist in 2023. They have been meeting in a community center since.

“We have an eternal perspective,” Mr. Thorne said of the violence in Michigan and the loss of his own church building. He mentioned the online fund-raiser for the attacker’s family started by a Latter-day Saints church member: “immediate forgiveness, immediate embrace.”

Latter-day Saints represent about 2 percent of the population in the United States. Almost half of Americans raised in the church leave it in adulthood, according to the Pew Research Center. But the church is also attracting new followers here and overseas, according to internal numbers presented publicly for the first time at the conference. Almost a million converts have joined the church in just the last three years, representing about 5 percent of total membership. Conversions rose this year over the previous year in regions including North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

In his decades rising within the church hierarchy, Mr. Oaks has been a key shaper of Latter-day Saints policy. In 1984, 20 years before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, Mr. Oaks drafted an influential memo encouraging the church to “vigorously” oppose its legalization. (It did.) In 2019, as one of two official counselors to Mr. Nelson, he instructed church leaders that God’s creation of humans as male and female referred to “biological sex at birth,” a clarification of a doctrinal document that transgender Latter-day Saints and their allies had interpreted more expansively.

“Most of us in the L.G.B.T.Q. space are frightened,” said Cynthia Winward, who lives in Provo, Utah, and hosts a feminist podcast focused on church issues. She recalled an address in which Mr. Oaks described God’s anger and wrath as evidence of his love, and an interview in which he suggested parents of gay adult children might not welcome them into the family home.

Ms. Winward, who has a gay daughter, did not attend the conference but tuned in to Mr. Oaks’s address on Sunday.

Mr. Oaks sees himself as someone who can speak to all corners of the church, said Benjamin Park, the author of “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism,” published last year. At the General Conference in April 2021, the first held after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Oaks criticized “mobs” that “intervene to intimidate or force government action.” In 2020, he told an audience at Brigham Young University that “Of course, Black lives matter!”

“As an institutionalist — in his mind a moderate — he’s as worried by the rise of right-wing extremism as he is by the corrosions of progressivism,” Dr. Park, a historian, said.

Mr. Oaks will become the church’s 18th leader in 195 years, stepping into a role that church members view not just as an executive but also as a living prophet.

Because succession is determined by seniority within an existing leadership body, Mr. Oaks’s ascent to the role is essentially guaranteed. There will be no crowds waiting for white smoke on Temple Square, as throngs of Catholics waited for news of the next pope in May.

Church leaders and members take pride in their orderly transitions. But those drama-free succession rules also mean that all presidents in the foreseeable future assume the office in their 90s. Mr. Nelson, who died at 101, was the church’s oldest president, and had been alive for more than half the life span of the church itself. In his later years, he was sometimes not able to attend General Conference, or delivered taped messages rather than live addresses.

Mr. Oaks required some assistance to walk to his seat during the conference this weekend, but he stood unassisted to deliver his 17-minute address on Sunday.