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 churches. As of 2014, it had 3,765,362 baptized members. 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 2.2 million members) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) (with approximately 380,000 members). There are also many in the United States, some of which came into being composed of dissidents following the major 1988 merger.