There’s no blogger whose writing I have consumed or appreciated more over the last decade than Jared Wilson. I want to point back to an old post from Jared called “The ‘Religious People’ Boogeyman. Originally, Jared wrote this post in response to a controversy with Perry Noble in 2011. This was even before he was blogging at TGC, and when For The Church wasn’t yet a twinkle in his eye.

Now, it’s been edited and reposted at For the Church (which, if you don’t have FTC bookmarked, you should). You should take 10 minutes and go read the whole thing. Here’s a small snippet:

It is so common a rhetorical practice among the preachers and speakers that I fear it is a systemic dysfunction in the attractional church paradigm which has defined itself largely in contrast to the boring, irrelevant, “traditional” church. This is what I’m talking about: The warning that there are “religious people” in our churches threatening our contempo-casual culture.

First of all, there are people in every church, no matter what kind of church it is, who struggle with the distinction between law and gospel, who struggle with the driving place of grace in their pursuit of holiness, so it won’t do to deny that legalism looms in our churches. Legalism lurks in every heart, actually, mine and yours. But this constant invoking of the judgmental “religious people” is very often a boogeyman. It’s an imagined threat, a scare tactic employed to both justify dumb exercises in license and arouse the self-satisfied mockery of self-identified “grace people.”

Go read the whole thing for yourself.

Also, while you’re here, here’s a short and hilarious video from Jared that I found on a very old Vimeo playlist of mine. Enjoy!