The North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church (German: Nordelbische Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche; NEK) was a Lutheran regional church in Northern Germany which emerged from a merger of four churches in 1977 and merged with two more churches in 2012. The NEK largely covered the area of the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg where it was the most important Christian denomination. It had 2.1 million members (as of 2006) in 595 parishes, constituting 46% of the population in its ambit.