When we lived overseas, we were encouraged to make lists of items we would need to grab in case of an evacuation. First there was the list for what to collect if we had only fifteen minutes to leave. Then there were lists for an evacuation in an hour, in 24 hours, and so on.
While a swift departure from our apartment in Taipei was a possibility, it didn’t loom over our heads as it does for many in other countries . . . so we never made a formal list. Rather, we had a cluster of absolutely-most-important-things kept in the same room: my laptop, our passports, extra credit cards, a printout of important contact information, a first-aid kit.
We never tackled listing the irreplaceable items, those with sentimental value. Like writing a will, it was hard to think about and too easy to put off.
If you had to leave your home in a hurry, what would you take? What if you had to escape your country, as well? And what if you knew it would probably be nearly 20 years before you were able to create a new home?
Melissa Fleming, chief spokesperson for the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, knows a lot about people who flee their homes and about what they lose and what they take with them. She knows a lot because she meets refugees and talks with them.
So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference, and making a difference starts with telling their stories. So when I meet refugees, I always ask them questions. Who bombed your house? Who killed your son? Did the rest of your family make it out alive? How are you coping in your life in exile? But there’s one question that always seems to me to be most revealing, and that is: What did you take? What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town, and the armed gangs were approaching your house?
She then shares the story of Hany, a young Syrian refugee who knew exactly what he would take when his family was forced to flee to Lebanon. “I took my high school diploma,” he said, “because my life depended on it.” He had risked his life in war-torn Syria to earn it, and he saw his education as his hope for the future.
Fleming goes on to tell more stories of refugees and to recount some sobering statistics, including these (I’ve added some additional numbers from “UNHCR: Facts and Figures about Refugees“):
The approximately 50 million forcibly displaced people at the end of 2013 is the highest number since World War II.
Each day last year, an average of 32,000 more people were forced from their homes.
33 million of the displaced people remain in their own country. 16.7 million flee to other countries, making them refugees.
86% of the world’s refugees are living in the developing world.
On average, a refugee will be displaced for 17 years.
The war in Syria has produced 6.5 million displaced people, about half its population. More than 3 million of them have entered neighboring countries.
Lebanon, a country of 4 million, is home to 1 million Syrian refugees.
Half of the Syrian refugees are children, and only 20% of those in Lebanon are in school.
Below is Fleming’s full TED Talk, followed by a video message from Hany, produced by the UNCHR.
The last video is “Lebanon: Through the Eyes of a Refugee,” featuring Hany’s photographs from his participation in the UNHCR workshop Do You See What I See? The two-week class on photography and writing was led by photojournalist Brendan Bannon.
“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.” I John 2:1 (NIV)
A couple weeks ago I was preparing a lesson for the adult Sunday-school class I help teach. (Sounds a little old fashioned and quaint, doesn’t it?) The text was the second chapter of John’s first letter.
As I took notes on my computer, I checked the news as it developed through the day—and the developing news that day was the demonstrations following the grand-jury decisions concerning two white police officers, Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, and the deaths of two black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
I am a white man, in a predominantly white Sunday-school class, in a predominantly white church, in a predominantly white city, in the predominantly white state of Missouri. I probably don’t have to remind you that Ferguson is in our state, too.
My lesson ended up tracing through the themes of I John 2. If we know Jesus, we will obey him. If you hate your brother, you live in darkness. Do not love the world. Beware of antichrists, who deny the Son.
But mixed with the verses on my computer screen were the headlines about the protests, the demonstrations, the riots, and the arrests.
Becoming Advocates
When I taught the class, after working through the chapter, I returned to the first verse, that verse that touches on the tension between justice and grace. Do not sin, John says, but if you do, Jesus will take your side. Jesus is our advocate before God, the judge. While Satan is the prosecutor, Jesus is the defense attorney.
Maybe it was a stretch, I told my class, but I needed to address what was going on in our country. I needed to talk about it, even if I had to shoehorn it in a little. If we Christians want to “live as Jesus did” (v 6), then we need to make ourselves advocates, too.
It’s an odd thing to think of God pleading our case to God. But the creator has shown us his love, his concern, his grace by mingling with us, talking with us, sharing meals with us. Through Jesus’ life on earth, he has empathy for us (Hebrews 4:15), and he has become our intercessor in heaven (Romans 8:34).
We need to listen to those who have different experiences than ours, to learn their perspective. As a white person, I realize my need to listen to the stories of blacks, to try to see the world through their eyes.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying in this picture that I am Jesus and blacks are the sinners needing my advocacy. Instead, I’m saying that all us Christians—of all races—need to imitate Jesus in breaching the walls that divide us and to plead for each other, before man and before God.
Months ago, well before these two high-profile incidents, many black people were already afraid of police officers. I could argue all I wanted that they shouldn’t be afraid, but my arguments would probably show how out of touch I am. Theirs is a fear that goes well beyond the nervousness I have when a police car pulls up behind me at an intersection.
Why is that? If we hope to understand, we’ll need to do a lot of listening, and not just to those who would reaffirm our comfortable assumptions. We’ll need to read viewpoints of people who’ve lived lives unlike our own. We’ll need to try to see the world through the eyes of people who don’t look like us. That doesn’t mean that we must always agree with what we hear. Often, the loudest, most strident voices are not the most reasonable. But if we want to hear the quieter voices, then we’ll need to listen that much harder. And then we can pass on what we hear, speaking on behalf of our brothers and sisters, to each other and to God.
The Other Side of Fear
Black civil rights attorney Constance Rice has worked for years building trust between minorities and the police in Los Angeles. While she started out as an adversary to LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, suing the department multiple times, they are now partners in reform.
During an 19-month period, Rice interviewed over 900 police officers. On NPR’s Morning Edition, she says that their talks became like “therapy sessions,” with some opening up to her about their own fears. “Miss Rice, I’m scared of black men. Black men terrify me,” they said. “Miss Rice, can you teach me how not to be afraid of black men?”
Are the people who said this racists? Rice says not consciously so, but a policeman’s fear can produce the same outcome as racism:
He doesn’t feel like it’s racism. The black community experiences it as racism, that’s very clear. So what I’m saying is that for people who have to be in the business of solving this dilemma you have to be able to step into the frightened tennis shoes of black kids, black male kids in particular. You have to be able to step into the combat boots of scared cops, and racist cops, and cruel cops, and good cops. And you have to be able to distinguish amongst all of those human experiences and then bring them together on a single platform of we’re going to solve this by empathizing. We’re going to solve it with compassion and we’re going to solve it with common sense.
Reconciliation Is Hard Work
Nearly twenty years ago, one of the books on my bookshelf was More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel, written in 1993 by Chris Rice (no relation to Constance Rice) and Spencer Perkins. Side by side on the cover were the smiling faces of the authors—one white and one black.
The two not only wrote a book together, but they and their families lived together in a community called Antioch, showing by example what they believed. The philosophy of their work can be summed up succinctly by the titles of their book’s three sections: Admit, Submit, and Commit.
Four years after they wrote More Than Equals, I assumed that the two were still smiling in the glow of their togetherness. But it wasn’t so. In 2010, Chris Rice told Christianity Today that he and Perkins “could hardly sit at the same dinner table” and living in Antioch had become too difficult for him and his wife. They wanted out.
Upon hearing the Rice’s desire to leave, an angry Perkins asked, “Why do only white folks make ultimatums like this?”
They called in two mentors to help keep them together, but meetings with them led to an outpouring of old grievances. Finally, as the mentors were about to leave, Rice says that he and Perkins were “interrupted by grace.” Perkins chose to allow the Rices to leave. The Rices chose to stay. Three months later, Perkins died of a heart attack.
The Need to Communicate
Some who have never heard of Spencer Perkins would be familiar with his father, the minister and civil-rights activist John Perkins. Born in 1930 into a family of sharecroppers, John was raised by his grandmother after his mother died before his first birthday. When John was 17, his older brother was shot and killed by a local sheriff. Later, with his own family, John became a Christian after Spencer, not yet in kindergarten, invited him to Sunday School. Even though he didn’t study beyond the third grade, John has authored numerous books and has been given honorary doctorates many times over.
I know of John Perkins through the writings of his son, and, more recently, from when he spoke at a service at my church this year. So while preparing my Sunday-school lesson, when I saw his name in another Christianity Today article, it grabbed my attention.
The article is entitled “A United Evangelical Response: The System Failed Eric Garner.” In it, a multi-racial group of 28 give their reactions to the grand jury decision following the death of Garner. The entire article is worth a read, but I will end here with John Perkins’ comments, as he discusses the need for the kind of talking and listening that leads to true reconciliation.
It seems like our nation is out of control, and some of this is the result of our polarization and our own victimization in both the black and white community. We have not found ways to confess to each other our wrongdoings and haven’t been able to make the kind of peace that could come from having that type of conversation. We haven’t been able to take the responsibility as God’s people or as citizens. As a nation, as individuals, and as communities, we need to start taking responsibility for our communities. As blacks, we need to take some responsibility for how we raise our children, and the whites need to take responsibility for their lack of forgiveness and imperialism and for some of the failure in our school and education systems. We also need to take responsibility for not training our police officers to affirm the dignity of humanity. We are all victims and have not found ways to truly reconcile to each other. I think that is the issue before us, and our task is learning how to actually communicate and have conversations, so we can get at some of these issues.
John Perkins is a great advocate for those who need his voice. I want to be an advocate, too.
Most commercials make me hit the mute button or click “Skip this Ad.” But some I like so much that I search them out on Youtube for a second, third, and fourth look. Here are two of those.
The first one, from Rosetta Stone Language Learning, begins with this: “Imagine the world if everyone learned just one more language. Imagine the stories we’d share.”
The second one, my favorite of the two, is from the American Heart Association. It opens with the words “Hello, Jack. Hello, Jack. I am your grandfather. I waited so long to meet you”—and ends with a nice surprise. (By the way, from what I can tell, the grandfather is learning his English from a Langenscheidt pocket dictionary.)
If I had a World War One military cap, I’d use it for a hat tip to the folks at Brigada.org. Thanks to them I got to see this year’s Christmas advertisement for the UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. It was created in honor of the 100-year anniversary of the Christmas Truce, when Allied and German soldiers, nearly five months into the first world war, climbed out of their foxholes and, in the no man’s land between them, found a way to celebrate Christmas together.
The stories of the Christmas Truce of 1914 come from diaries and letters of soldiers on the front lines in Europe. The people who made the Sainsbury’s ad tell about the background for the video in their “Story behind Our Christmas Ad” below, quoting several of the first-hand accounts.
Following are excerpts of what the soldiers wrote a century ago, showing in stark terms how longed for, and how elusive, peace on earth is.
From a letter written by British Rifleman J. Reading to his wife—
I hope you all had a merry Christmas; let me tell you how I spent mine. My company happened to be in the firing line on Christmas eve, and it was my turn—with a non-commissioned officer and four others—to go into a ruined house and remain there until 6.30 on Christmas morning. During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English. They shouted out: “Are you the Rifle Brigade; have you a spare bottle; if so we will come half way and you come the other half.” At 4 a.m part of their Band played some Christmas carols and “God save the King”, and “Home Sweet Home.” You could guess our feelings. Later on in the day they came towards us, and our chaps went out to meet them. Of course neither of us had any rifles. I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet that it seemed like a dream. We took advantage of the quiet day and brought our dead in.
From Regimental Sergeant-Major George Beck’s diary—
Not one shot was fired. English and German soldiers intermingled and exchanged souvenirs. Germans very eager to exchange almost anything for our bully beef and jam. Majority of them know French fluently.
From the diary of German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch—
Soldier Möckel from my company, who had lived in England for many years, called to the British in English, and soon a lively conversation developed between us. . . . Afterwards, we placed even more candles than before on our kilometre-long trench, as well as Christmas trees. It was the purest illumination—the British expressed their joy through whistles and clapping. Like most people, I spent the whole night awake. It was a wonderful, if somewhat cold, night.
The following incidents will give you an idea of how some of our Tommies spent Christmas Day. The Scots Guards and the Germans opposite, by mutual consent, mixed freely with each other. They exchanged addresses, and promised to write to each other—a typical habit of Tommy’s. Two of the German officers took dinner with our two officers, and before they left arranged to play a football match on New Year Day. Six of the Worcesters had lunch in the German lines, and the same number of Germans had lunch in ours. Before parting, it was arranged that before firing recommenced on either side three volleys should be fired in the air. A week from now these men on both sides will be doing almost unspeakable things in order to kill each other.
And from the Royal Engineers’ Lance-Corporal Henderson—
The alarm went about midnight, and we stood up till daybreak, when we found that our pals of the previous two days had tried to rush our position, but they got cut up as usual, and I believe the next morning the ground where we had been so chummy, and where Germans had wished us a merry Christmas, was now covered with their dead.
Read very many reports of people who out of the blue quit their prestigious, well-paying jobs (for example, company CEO, NBA coach, speaker of the house), and you’ll quickly see that one of the main reasons they claim is “to spend more time with family.” Of course, we understand that in most cases, that’s a boilerplate answer used to sidestep what’s really going on. The truth is much more difficult to discern.
When it comes to missionary attrition, the situation is not much different.
After finishing our first term on the mission field in Taiwan, I and my family made our first trip back to the States. During that visit I heard a representative from our sending agency talk about the many reasons why missionaries leave the field. What she said went something like this:
There’s the reason you tell your supporters.
There’s the reason you tell your church.
There’s the reason you tell your agency.
There’s the reason you tell your teammates.
There’s the reason you tell your family.
There’s the reason you tell yourself.
And there’s the reason you tell God.
stated reasons (written in the missionary’s prayer letter)
personal reasons (told to close friends or family)
secret reasons (not shared but believed deep in the missionary’s heart)
leader’s reasons (identified by the team or field leader)
recorded reasons (added to the missionary’s file)
believed reasons (accepted by the director of the sending base)
socially accepted reasons (published in the mission journal)
further reasons identified by the missionary’s professional counsellor, and
true reasons (a combination of the above or something completely different)
Bloecher’s listing is part of his discussion of the challenges faced by the Mission Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) when, in 1994, they set out to examine why missionaries leave their work. Their study, surveying 551 mission organizations and sending churches from 14 countries, was called ReMAP (Reducing Missionary Attrition Project), and their findings were reported and discussed in Too Valuable to Lose: Exploring the Causes and Cures of Missionary Attrition.
Why do missionaries leave the field? It seems that it’s hard to say.
Attrition Happens
In Chapter 6 of Too Valuable to Lose, Peter Brierley writes that one of the key findings of ReMAP is that each year the on-field mission force loses 5.1% of its workers. Of these, 71% leave for what are called “preventable reasons.” These reasons are in contrast to non-preventable reasons, “such as normal retirement, a political crisis, death of a spouse, marriage outside the mission, or a change of job.”
To clarify, this number of “leaving” missionaries includes those who resign from one agency and then join another, thus returning to the field, but it does not include those who leave the field to take a home-based position with their agency.
When grouped in categories, the reasons that ReMAP found for missionary attrition are as follows, ranked by weight/importance:
Unpreventable
Personal
Marriage/Family
Society
Work-Related
Team
Cultural
Other
Broken down further, the complete list includes 26 reasons, arranged by perceived significance, from greatest to least:
Normal retirement
Child(ren)
Change of job
Health problems
Lack of home support
Problems with peers
Personal concerns
Disagreement with agency
Inadequate commitment
Lack of call
Outside marriage
Immature spiritual life
Marriage/family conflict
Poor cultural adaptation
Problems with local leaders
Elderly parents
Inappropriate training
Lack of job satisfaction
Political crisis
Inadequate supervision
Death in service
Dismissal by agency
Immoral lifestyle
Language problems
Theological reasons
Other
Where Should the Data Come From?
It is important to note, and fully acknowledged by ReMAP researchers, that the reasons above are not necessarily those given by the missionaries themselves. Rather, they are the ones perceived to be true by their sending agency or church. This is because, writes Jonathan Lewis in Too Valuable to Lose, interviewing all 4,400 missionaries who left the field during the study period, from 1992-1994, would have been nearly impossible. And by choosing to get data from organization “decision makers,” the researchers were involving the people who would have the power to later make the changes necessary to reduce attrition.
This method of gathering data on attrition is not uncommon in the missionary community. Mark Wingfield, writing in the Baptist Standard, reports that the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB) carries out a study each year on personnel attrition, with regional supervisors filling out the survey forms.
In 2000, several IMB trustees had questions about the reported numbers. They wondered if IMB’s recent movement of missionaries to new fields had caused an increase in missionary attrition.
David Garrison, then the associate vice president for strategy coordination and mobilization, assured them that that was not the case.
IMB’s figures showed that in 1999, only 9.56% of those who left their work left with “disagreement with IMB philosophy, policies, staff or structure as a contributing reason.” The largest proportion, 25%, left because of a “change in understanding of God’s call.”
Winfield writes that Garrison “admitted some who resigned could have failed to cite their true feelings about IMB philosophy changes but expressed confidence that was not likely to have been true in many cases.”
Drilling Deeper
When Worth Keeping was published in 2007, it was ten years after Too Valuable to Lose. The second book uses the results of the ReMAP II (Retaining Missionaries: Agency Practices) study to followup on ReMAP, this time focusing on what organizations can do to keep their missionaries. ReMAP II called on agency leaders to evaluate their practices, and then their responses were used to find correlations between methods and retention.
Two months ago, the mission research organization Global Mapping International (GMI) published a post on their blog commenting on ReMAP II, calling it “one of the more famous mission research studies since the turn of the millennium.” But GMI reports that when Jim Van Meter, the leader of the US analysis, looked at the correlations, he found that the practices and retention rates didn’t match up as expected. So he asked GMI for its input. Were the questions flawed?
No, said GMI. “The problem isn’t the questions. It’s the person answering them!” They explain further:
Administrators can reliably answer factual questions about their agency’s practices, but they cannot reliably answer evaluative questions related to their support of field staff.
GMI cites the following example: In ReMAP II, administrators were asked to rate their agencies’ practices in relation to the statement “Missionaries are included in major decisions related to the field.” While the responses showed that this is something that agencies do well, the findings did not correlate with retention rates.
When GMI did their own survey of over 1,700 workers in the field, the phrase “My organization involves employees in decisions that affect them” was rated in the bottom 10 of 68 items. And unlike in ReMAP II, this finding did correlate with retention.
The solution, says GMI, is a third-party collector of data, and in what they call a “shameless plug,” they offerEngage, “a customized Field Missionary-Friendly employee survey,” implemented by GMI and Best Christian Workplaces. By using Engage, they say, “Everyone wins. Leadership teams get to celebrate successes and identify priorities. Boards receive meaningful measures and see how leaders are taking initiative. Field staff gets a chance to be heard and offer ideas.”
Getting the Full Picture
To better know why missionaries leave the field, it makes sense to me to start with what the missionaries themselves have to say, reported by them, unfiltered through others. We all have our natural, inherent biases, along with fears that come with speaking and hearing the unvarnished truth, and the less we add these to the equation, the closer we will get to that truth.
This won’t be easy, and we should consider utilizing GMI and Best Christian Workplaces, and other groups like them, for their objectivity and for their experience in conducting and analyzing surveys. At best, surveys should be repeated consistently (as is done by the IMB), and they should be shared with, and owned by, everyone in the organization, not just those in leadership.
While I highly value the responses of missionaries, I also realize that their views alone aren’t guaranteed to represent the whole picture on the causes of attrition. Missionaries don’t always completely understand their own situations, and even when they do, they’re too often inclined to voice safe or respectable explanations. Getting to the truth will take patient listening and will need to seek anecdotal input that goes beyond numerical responses to a standardized list of questions.
Groups and individuals who offer member care and debriefing can help in this area. They often hear what others do not, because of their willingness to listen and because of the safe outlets they provide. But care needs to be taken to ensure that any reporting they do does not compromise the very trust they have fostered that encourages missionaries to share openly.
Writing in Too Valuable to Lose, Brierley suggests that future research on attrition goes beyond the statistics of quantitative research and move to the explanations of qualitative research. One example he gives of how this would be helpful would be to look more deeply at the differences between responses collected from different sources. How and why do the reasons given by missionaries and those written in the missionary’s personnel file and those believed to be true by mission leaders differ?
The Truth Is Out There
We need to recognize that though the truth on why missionaries leave the field may be elusive, it can be found. The differences in viewpoints can cause confusion, but they can also bring clarity. Recognizing how we see things differently can help us get closer to the truth and can also point out areas where more communication is necessary.
I think of how we prepare for the classic interview question, “What is your greatest weakness?” Knowing that the question is coming, we try to prepare an answer that at least seems honest but also doesn’t reveal an actual grievous problem. In one interview, I was asked to tell what my coworkers would say my greatest weakness was. Though I can’t remember what I said, I know it was more revealing. Just looking at myself through others’ eyes helps me see myself more clearly.
I hope that we will be able to trust each other more and become more open to listening to different perspectives. This goes both ways in the relationships between mission leaders and field workers—and should also include researchers, trainers, and member-care workers. We’re all on the same team, and while we sometimes don’t see eye to eye, we all are working toward the same goals.
So back to the question: Why do missionaries leave the field?
It is hard to say. But if we commit ourselves to opening our hearts and our ears, it’s far from impossible.
[Update: Global Mapping International closed in June of 2017, and the Engage survey is no longer available. For more on this and for a deeper look at the ReMAP results, see my post at A Life Overseas.]
Over the past 15 years, substantial changes have occurred to the landscape of international students on US university campuses.
According to data released today by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in the 2014Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, since 1999/2000, the number of international students in the US has increased by 72%, to an all-time high in 2013/14 of 886,052.
Since statistics have been collected by IIE, starting in 1948, the number of international students has increased each year, except for 1971/72 and from 2003 to 2006. The growth for the past school year of 8.1% is the largest percentage increase since 1980/81.
The top country for sending students to the US has been China over the past 15 years, with its share of total international students growing from 11% to 31%. But the rest of the top ten has seen significant shuffling.
In 1999/2000, the number-two country was Japan. Since then, their numbers have dropped by 59%, moving them down to 7th place. India, South Korea, and Canada have each moved up one spot, landing them at 2nd, 3rd, and 5th, respectively.
The countries making the biggest jumps over the past 15 years, moving into the top ten, are Saudi Arabia (from 21st to 4th), Vietnam (43rd to 8th), and Brazil (13th to 10th).
Taiwan has dropped from 5th to 6th; Mexico has held steady at 9th; and Indonesia, Thailand, and Turkey have fallen out of the top ten.
Other changes over the past 15 years are
The contribution of international students to the US economy has grown from $9 billion to $27 billion.
In 2000, schools hosting 1,000 or more internationals numbered 135. Now there are 231.
The majority (2/3) of international students are supported primarily by family or personal funds, but the proportion of those funded by their governments has tripled.
International education, says Evan M. Ryan, assistant secretary of state for Education and Cultural Affairs, is a key part of meeting today’s global challenges:
International education is crucial to building relationships between people and communities in the United States and around the world. It is through these relationships that together we can solve global challenges like climate change, the spread of pandemic disease, and combatting violent extremism. We also need to expand access to international education for students from more diverse backgrounds, in more diverse locations of study, getting more diverse types of degrees. Only by engaging multiple perspectives within our societies can we all reap the numerous benefits of international education—increased global competence, self-awareness and resiliency, and the ability to compete in the 21st century economy.
The fifteen-year data was compiled in conjunction with this year’s 15th anniversary of International Education Week (November 17-21), a celebration initiative by the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Education.
Here’s another way to get rid of those pesky frequent-flyer miles. Actually, it’s not the miles that are pesky, it’s those notices that your miles are going to expire due to inactivity that get irritating.
Last year, I wrote about trading a few hundred miles for magazine subscriptions. But maybe you don’t need another Golf Digest laying around your house. Maybe you want to live out your belief that it’s better to give than to receive.
Most airlines allow you to give your miles to selected charities, and it’s even easier than buying magazines. In fact, it probably takes more clicks to find the donation site than to make the donation.
I’ve put together a list of airline donation sites to help the cause. I give credit to the folks at MileDonation.com for giving me a head start on finding some of the links. More about MileDonation below.
What is it that makes IKEA a global phenomenon? Is it the DIY furniture? Is it the maze-like stores with free childcare? Is it the lingonberry jam?
Whatever the cause, the behemoth that is IKEA is not only the biggest producer and manufacturer of furniture in the world but also the most “meaningful.”
According to Paris-based Havas Media, IKEA ranks #6 on its list of “Meaningful Brands,” the result of a global survey measuring how people think companies benefit their “personal and collective well-being.” (Three years ago, IKEA was #1.)
Here’s my list of 10 things that give IKEA meaning in today’s world.
1. It’s big, Big, BIG
As of October 15, IKEA has 364 stores in 46 countries (map). These include the two stores in Taipei, where I was first introduced to the chain, and the newest store in the US, which opened last month in Meriam, KS, about two hours from my home.
IKEA is known for it’s “flat box” furniture, bought in a box at the store and assembled at home by the customer. While this can cause frustrations, especially if a piece is missing, it has it’s upsides. Researchers from Harvard, Yale, and Duke found that when people put effort into creating something, they like it more, even valuing their creations over others of higher quality. They dub this the “IKEA effect.”
It’s too early to say for sure, but I think the term IKEA diplomacy is going to catch on, too. Just a little over a week ago, Sweden recognized Palestinian statehood. This was followed by a swift condemnation from Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who said, “Sweden must understand that relations in the Middle East are much more complicated than self-assembly furniture at Ikea.”
“I will be happy to send Israeli FM Lieberman an Ikea flat pack to assemble,” responded the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom. “He’ll see it requires a partner, co-operation, and a good manual.”
4. IKEA’s catalog is published in biblical proportions
Each year, IKEA prints millions of its catalogs each year. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2012 the company planned to distribute 208 million, which is estimated to be more than twice the amount of Bibles that are produced each year.
In 2012, the IKEA catalog made news when the company removed images of women from photos in the version distributed in Saudi Arabia. IKEA later apologized.
And September marked the announcement of the 2015 catalog in the highly innovative—dare I say groundbreaking—form of the “bookbook.” Genius.
If you’ve shopped at an IKEA or browsed a catalog, then you know that each product carries some kind of Swedish—or Swedish-ish—name. They often sound odd (a shelf named Ekby Bjärnmum), sometimes funny (a soil block is called Kokosnöt), and sometimes unfortunate (I’ll let you Google for these yourself).
Of course, this isn’t just a Swedish-to-English issue. TheWall Street Journal reports that before opening a store in Thailand, IKEA put together a team with the sole purpose of catching names that sound off-color to the Thai ear, such as Redalen (a bed) and Jättebra (a plant pot), both of which sound like Thai sexual terms.
And then there’s Lufsig, IKEA’s stuffed wolf toy. In December of last year, an anti-government protestor in Hong Kong threw one at Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Cy Leung during a town-hall meeting. The man tossed the toy because Leung is called “wolf” by his critics. The action took on more meaning since the Cantonese name for the stuffed toy sounds like a crude sexual term in that language. Lfusigs became a must-have item and soon sold out.
6. Name another furniture store that’s known for it’s food
According to The Wall Street Journal, IKEA’s food division is on par in sales with Panera’s and Arby’s. And the cornerstone of its in-store restaurants and grocery products is the humble Swedish meatball, of which they sell around 150 million each year.
The meatballs are nothing fancy, just really, really good. Here’s how they’re described on the company website, in typical Scandinavian understatement:
KÖTTBULLAR
Meatballs, frozen
Key features
– Meatballs are minced meat formed into round balls and then fried. Serve with boiled potatoes, lingonberry jam and cream sauce.
Even after its meatballs were recalled across Europe early last year, the store’s culinary reputation survived. Why the recall? Trace amounts of horse meat were discovered in a batch made by a Swedish supplier. If that news still gives you pause, have patience. Next year IKEA plans to roll out meatless vegetarian meatballs.
In the UK, IKEA even brews its own line of dark lager and regular brew beers.
Remember, this is a furniture chain we’re talking about.
7. It doesn’t want only to sustain its business, it wants to sustain the planet, too
Vegetarian meatballs aren’t the only thing “green” about IKEA.
The company started selling roof-top solar panels in the UK last year and in September it announced plans to expand that offering to 8 more countries in the following 18 months. It’s starting with the Netherlands and Switzerland and will move on from there.
As reported by Reuters, IKEA has installed 700,000 solar panels on its own rooftops at stores around the world and has plans to up its global use of wind turbines to 224. Other green initiatives include plans to replace, by 2020, all the plastic in its products with recycled plastic or renewable materials, such as wood.
And if you’re driving your electric car in the United Kingdom, you’ll appreciate IKEA’s announcement that all UK stores now have free electric vehicle rapid recharging points installed in their parking lots.
8. In the time it takes to put together a couple bookcases, you could build a shelter for a refugee
Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the IKEA Foundation has invested $4.8 million to develop portable shelters, to be used by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Last year, 50 prototypes were shipped, in flat-pack boxes, to Syrian refugee camps. Olivier Delarue, UNHCR head of innovation, says that his agency was looking for an improvement on the tents typically used to house the displaced around the world and turned to IKEA for its “expertise in certain areas—such as logistics and flatpacking—that we could learn from.”
According to The Boston Globe, each 188-square-foot unit takes about four hours to assemble. The cost of a prototypes is $10,000 but is expected to fall below $1,000.
9. An IKEA store is like a 20-bedroom home away from home
It seems that many IKEAs not only have lines of people waiting to buy home furnishings, they also have lines of people wanting to make themselves at home.
Take, for instance, shoppers in China who lounge on the couches and climb under the covers for naps in the beds (photos at ChinaHush). Camilla Hammar, marketing director for IKEA in China, tells Advertising Age that stores there don’t just allow the try-it-out approach, they welcome it, embracing the idea that for the Chinese, shopping at IKEA can be an emotional experience. “It tends to initiate very romantic feelings,” she says. “The first time some couples start talking about getting married is in our showrooms. So that’s something we’ve tapped into.” And that’s why the store in Nanjing hosted three Swedish-style weddings for three couples as a PR event.
But it’s not just the Chinese who want to take advantage of the store’s sleeping—or wedding—accommodations. When Havas Media UK was looking for a way to promote the chain, they found a Facebook group called “I wanna have a sleepover at IKEA.” They latched on to the idea and organized “IKEA’s Big Sleepover” for 100 lucky customers.
And when couple in Maryland looked for a venue for their wedding in 2012, they chose the IKEA store where they had their first date. Another pair, this time in New Jersey, got married last year in an IKEA framing department, the same place where they’d met eight years earlier.
Even Hollywood knows that domestic magic can happen in IKEA.
Of course, adding IKEA to a relationship doesn’t ensure bliss—even in Sweden. A story in The Local last year recounts how police were called to a home in Strömstad by neighbors who were concerned about loud noises during the early morning hours. The authorities found that the “banging and screaming” was caused by a couple putting together a piece of IKEA furniture, and by their crying child.
There’s nothing like assembling furniture to check your love for your significant other. Well, maybe shopping for furniture can have the same effect. A trip to IKEA could be the perfect premarital outing for couples wanting to see if their love has what it takes to go the distance. Take a look at the video below to get an off-kilter view of the store that just might be “the number one place where couples realize they actually can’t stand each other.”
Clearing Customs 