Still, when she tells people she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she often loses them before she is halfway through the name.

“You always have to follow up with Mormon,” she said. “Because it’s longer, people are like, ‘Oh, it’s the Seventh-day Adventists.’ I’m like, no, still no.”

In Utah, Travis Anderson, Ms. Anderson’s brother-in-law, had long disliked the “inordinate” amount of time it would take trying to convince people that his faith was actually founded in Jesus.

“It used to be you’d say Mormon, and the first things people would say would be polygamy or racists,” he said as he prepared to lead a Boy Scout camping trip in Moab, Utah. “Now you can immediately move into a conversation about, what is your view on abortion, life after death, any of these other more spiritually based topics.”

But others have felt frustration — even anger and confusion — over the name shift.

When Alma Loveland of Springville, Utah, heard the announcement last summer, her workday was “wrecked.” To be Mormon had long been her cultural identity, she said, even though she stopped practicing the faith three years ago and now calls herself an ex-Mormon or former Mormon.

“It was a source of pride for me,” Ms. Loveland, 38, said. “This is the word. It was community, my people.”

Many families have felt the tension of the shift. In Virginia, Meredith Marshall Nelson, 33, editor of the Mormon Women Project, a storytelling platform, said she supported the church’s desire to use its official name, but had found herself simply saying she was a Christian if there was no time to explain more. She said she would mourn the loss of the word Mormon if it became a complete taboo.