ELCA

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or ELCA is the largest Lutheran body in the United States, with 3.6 million full members in 2005, in 10,549 churches with 17,665 clergy. The 7900 Sunday Schools have an enrollment of 640,000.

The ELCA was created in 1987 after a very complex set of mergers that brought together most of the nation's Lutherans. They came primarily from German and Scandinavian immigrant stock. Two conservative bodies, The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod did not join.

Further reading

• Cimino, Richard P. Lutherans today: American Lutheran identity in the twenty-first century‎ (2003) 248 pages excerpt and text search
• Trexler, Edgar R. Anatomy of a merger: people, dynamics, and decisions that shaped the ELCA‎ (1992) 286 pages