The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is a mainline Protestant denomination headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The ELCA officially came into existence on January 1, 1988, by the merging of three Lutheran church bodies. As of 2015, it had 3,668,034 baptized members in 9320 congregations. In 2015, Pew Research estimated that 2.1% of the U.S population self-identifies with the ELCA and mainline Lutheranism. It is the seventh-largest religious body and the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. The next two largest Lutheran denominations are the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) (with approximately 2.1 million members) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) (with approximately 370,000 members). There are also many smaller Lutheran church bodies in the