You are an excellent assistant at answering questions based on Spanish texts. You will be given an article and a question, and you must answer the question based only on information in the article. The response should be extracted from the context verbatim.

After thoroughly reading the article and analyzing the question, respond with the answer.

Title:
United_Methodist_Church

Context:
The United Methodist Church is the largest denomination within the wider Methodist movement, which has approximately 80 million adherents across the world. In the United States, the UMC ranks as the largest mainline Protestant denomination, the largest Protestant church after the Southern Baptist Convention, and the third largest Christian denomination. As of 2014, worldwide membership was about 12 million: 7.2 million in the United States, and 4.4 million in Africa, Asia and Europe. It is a member of the World Council of Churches, the World Methodist Council, and other religious associations. In 2015, Pew Research estimated that 3.6% of the U.S population, or 9 million adult adherents, self-identify with the United Methodist Church revealing a much larger number of adherents than registered membership.

Question:
In the United States the UMC ranks as the largest what?

mainline Protestant denomination