An Unremarkable Life: On Decreasing So Christ Might Increase
A few weeks ago, our son had to have an MRI. We were braced for the inevitable waiting, sitting with that uneasy mixture of prayer, worry, and hope that accompanies hospital visits. When the results came back, the radiology report contained the phrase: “an unremarkable scan.”
I confess, we laughed. They had just examined his brain, his wonderful, complicated teenage brain, and pronounced it “unremarkable.” I turned to my wife and said, “Well, at least they didn’t say he had a remarkable brain. We’d have never heard the end of that!”
But the phrase stuck with me. In medicine, “unremarkable” is good news. It means nothing abnormal, nothing to panic about. Yet in our cultural understanding, “unremarkable” is the last thing we want to be called. Who wants to live an unremarkable life? We want to stand out, leave a mark, make sure our existence gets noticed. We want to be influential. Being unremarkable feels like failure.
Yet the Scriptures push us in the opposite direction. John the Baptist, perhaps the most popular preacher of his day, the fiery prophet who drew crowds and baptized multitudes, summed up his life’s mission in a sentence: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
He understood something we often miss: the goal of the Christian life is not to be remarkable but to make Christ remarkable.
Our Addiction to Being Remarkable
The modern mantra appears simple. Be remarkable. Whether through career achievements, our social media feeds, or our personal brands (don’t roll your eyes, we all have them!), the pressure is relentless. From motivational posters in the hotel our church meets in, to influencers hawking productivity “hacks,” the cultural gospel is clear. Your worth depends on how much you stand out, how much you rise above. Don’t be a normie!
Even in church life, this disease seeps in. Pastors build platforms and reach. Worship leaders long for recording contracts. Churches market themselves as if they were tech start-ups competing for customers. Even the ordinary Christian feels the weight. Each of us is expected to be extraordinary at parenting, evangelism, prayer, and community service. And if we’re not, then perhaps we’re not really useful to God. This is a heavy burden to load onto ourselves. It distorts discipleship into performance and witness into self-promotion. When we crave remarkability, we begin to believe the gospel depends on us—on our eloquence, our charisma, or our ability to draw a crowd.
But if the spotlight is always on us, how can it ever fall fully on Christ?
John the Baptist: Patron Saint of the Unremarkable
Consider John the Baptist, or “Crazy John” if you’ve watched The Chosen. Few figures have ever generated more attention in a short span of time. People flocked to hear him. He lived with prophetic eccentricity, dressed in camel hair, and ate locusts and honey. I mean, that’s weird enough as it is! And yet, when his disciples pointed out that Jesus’s ministry was drawing larger crowds, John didn’t flinch. He didn’t rush to protect his market share, branding, or attendance figures on ChurchSuite. Instead, he responded with breathtaking clarity:
“A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ . . . He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:27–30).
John knew who he was, and more importantly, who he was not. His role was never to be the light but to bear witness to the light. His voice mattered only because it carried the Word. His baptism prepared the way for the One who would baptize with fire and Spirit. In John we see a life oriented away from the self and toward the Savior. His greatness was precisely that he did not cling to greatness. He was content to fade as Christ came into focus. That is the strange, liberating vocation of every Christian: to live in such a way that Jesus becomes more visible and we become less.
Biblical Decreasing
This rhythm, leaders stepping back so that others, and ultimately God’s purposes, can flourish, runs throughout Scripture. Moses leads Israel to the edge of the Promised Land, but it is Joshua who carries them across the Jordan. David gathers resources for the Temple, but it is Solomon who builds it. Elijah anoints Elisha with a double portion, gladly handing on the prophetic mantle.
The apostles understood the same principle. Paul writes of himself and Apollos:
“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed . . . I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:5–7).
Their ministry was significant, but not ultimate. They were jars of clay carrying treasures that were not their own.
And at the heart of it all is Christ himself, who teaches that “the last shall be first” (Matt. 20:16), who blesses the meek (Matt. 5:5), and compares his own death to a grain of wheat falling into the ground to bear much fruit (John 12:24). The Son of God embraced decreasing, not only in his humility before the Father, but in his self-emptying unto death, that we might share his life.
But if this is the model of Jesus, why do we struggle with it so much?
Why Decreasing is Hard
Let’s be honest, this is a difficult thing for us. It cuts against every instinct we have.
First, decreasing feels like a threat to our identity. If I am not remarkable, then what am I? Our sense of self has become so tied to achievement and recognition that obscurity feels like erasure.
Second, recognition is addictive. We crave the dopamine hit of applause, the subtle affirmation that we matter. Even in ministry, a sermon that gets a few amens or a compliment from the person at the front can leave us secretly hungry for more.
Third, weakness feels shameful. Paul writes of his thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12), but most of us would rather boast of successes than admit frailties. To decrease feels like failure, not faith.
Finally, the modern world has weaponized visibility. Online, irrelevance is the great fear. To go unseen is to be unheard, and to be unheard is to vanish. Our generation is less afraid of persecution than of being ignored. It’s like that old media adage: “Even if they are talking about you in a negative way, they are still talking about you.” I used to listen to a political podcast in which every episode functioned as a lament about the public fascination with Donald Trump. They decried the fact that everyone talked about him all the time. Meanwhile, every one of their podcast titles had his name in it, and they spent ninety percent of their time talking about him. Why? Because that’s how you remain visible and relevant.
I often wonder if those who are deemed ‘influencers’ in the Christian world are exhausted by the need to be constantly on, constantly talking, posting on Instagram, creating content. No wonder John’s words sound alien. “He must increase, I must decrease.” Everything in us resists that downward movement.
The Strange Freedom of Being Unremarkable
And yet, there is true freedom here. To decrease is not to disappear but to be freed from illusions of grandeur. Or “notions” if you are Irish! If Christ is the Savior, then I don’t have to be. If the Spirit gives growth, then I don’t have to manufacture it. If God’s glory is what matters, then my reputation doesn’t need to carry the weight. This is liberating for ordinary Christians whose faithfulness may never make headlines. In the eyes of the world, unremarkable. In the eyes of Christ, radiant.
The apostle Paul captures the paradox wonderfully, “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Cor. 4:7). The fragility of the vessel highlights the glory of the treasure. Weakness is not a liability to the gospel but the canvas upon which God paints his power. And here’s where the MRI image comes back into my mind. In medicine, unremarkable is healthy. It means nothing diseased, nothing destructive, nothing sinister. In the kingdom of God, unremarkable can mean useful, faithful, fruitful. It means Christ can shine without competition from our ego.
The doctor’s verdict, “an unremarkable scan,” was precisely what we hoped to hear. Ordinary, uneventful, normal. In medical terms, unremarkable is remarkable. So too in discipleship. An unremarkable life, lived faithfully for Christ, may be the greatest gift we offer the world. For the story of the Christian life is not the story of our greatness but of Christ’s glory. One day, when we get to Heaven, the most astonishing tales may not come from those with the biggest followings or most popular platforms, but from the saints whose names history has already forgotten. Those who decreased so that Christ might increase. Those who were content to be unremarkable so that the gospel might be remarkable.
That is the paradox we must learn to embrace. When we are desperate to be noticed, the most compelling witness may come from those who quietly fade into the background, so that the spotlight falls, at last, where it belongs.
Editors’ note: A version of this article appeared on the author’s Substack.