If someone out there still doesn’t get my delighted obsession with evangelical infighting, this G3 Ministries story ought to do the trick. This popular ministry just closed its doors after an egregious incident involving a mystery brown envelope containing anonymous complaints against someone they knew, someone that they absolutely had to know was a protected dog of the extreme right-wing end of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The fallout spelled the entire end of the senders’ ministry.
Today’s tale of woe is a mind-boggling story of catastrophically bad business and personal decisions that illustrates that to evangelicals, rules are always for thee and never for me.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 9/20/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do!)
SITUATION REPORT: The grown men of G3 Ministries acted like a pack of middle-school girls with a Burn Book. Again.
This past March, the four leaders of a parachurch organization called G3 Ministries decided it’d be awesome to send anonymous packets of printouts to the elders and deacons of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas (FBC). Later in July, they also mailed packets to other Reformed leaders, including Tom Ascol, a hardliner in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Ascol is not part of the SBC’s formal power structure. But he is a powerful voice within its Old Guard faction. He also leads a Reformed group called Founders Ministries.
The packets offered 27 pages of printed-out evidence that FBC’s pastor, Tom Buck, had plagiarized many of his sermons. Their database contained a number of passages he’d allegedly copied nearly verbatim without attribution from other Christians’ work. The people who’d written that work were not affiliated with G3, at least that I could find, nor with any other players in this scandal.
In the packet, the senders claimed that they were writing anonymously because they thought Tom Buck would attack them in turn if he found out who they were. I mean, they’re probably right. In my opinion, Tom Buck is both vindictive and vicious. Nonetheless, their decision to complain anonymously will sound disastrously stupid to anyone who watches evangelicals for more than a few minutes—as I’ll show you shortly.
The senders of these packets clearly hoped that their accusations would end Buck’s time as the pastor of FBC. Their three-page-long preamble to the plagiarism database accuses Buck implicitly of violating his congregation’s trust, of dishonesty, and even of violating “the Ninth Commandment” (about not bearing false witness, which you can likely guess had me wheezing with laughter; they also accused him of violating the Eighth Commandment, which is about not stealing).
Alas, the fallout of the packets’ mailing ran entirely differently: The G3 leaders had to quit, G3 itself closed, Tom Buck kept his job, and Tom Ascol savagely mocked them on Twitter and only used their efforts in modeling how evangelical leaders should take anonymous complaints. (We’ll discuss that modeling next time.)
Today, I’ll show you how this showdown happened, who the players are, and why this entire tempest-in-a-teapot perfectly encapsulates why hardline Reformed evangelicals are not qualified to lecture anyone about morality.
Because seriously, this isn’t even the first time G3 Ministries leaders have been caught red-handed making anonymous accounts like middle-school kids with Burn Books.
Everyone, meet G3 Ministries
G3 Ministries is—or rather, I suppose now, was—a Reformed “parachurch” organization that taught preaching methods and doctrine to a target market of mostly church leaders. The term “parachurch” just means it isn’t specifically a church itself. (Campus ministries often get called parachurch organizations as well.) It launched in 2013. If you’re wondering, G3 means “Gospel – Grace – Glory.”
The founder of G3 is Josh Buice (apparently pronounced to rhyme with “ice”). Buice is—or, again, was—the pastor of Pray’s Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia. Pray’s Mill was part of SBC until 2022. That year, Buice withdrew his church’s affiliation due to concerns about liberal drift.
G3 leaders positioned the group on the far-right side of the evangelical culture wars. They made fat bank for some time through well-attended annual conferences. In their heyday, these were huge evangelical conferences with up to 8k in attendance, and also definitely the largest Reformed ones around. Leaders and members alike fell into the category people have informally dubbed “theo-bros” —mostly-Millennial, Reformed, politicized, and extremely-conservative guys who borrow authority from Bible verses to validate their goal of bringing all of evangelicalism under their rule. Here are some 2024 G3 conference topics:
- “Cessationism Defined” (the term means that Jesus doesn’t do big flashy sign- or gift-type miracles these days; a lot of theo-bros go this way)
- “The Call to Defend the Church Against Error”
- “The Influence of the Charismatic Movement on the Modern Church”
- “Exposing the Troubled Foundation of the Charismatic Movement”
- “The Danger of Demon Slayers and Deliverance Ministries”
- “The Cessation of the Gift of Prophecy and Why the Church Should Cease to Use the ‘God Told Me’ Language” (from Josh Buice himself)
In short, G3 and its leaders acted like they were extremely serious about both their hardline evangelicalism and their Reformed theology.
Our first point on the line: The first G3 Ministries anonymous-attack scandal
In 2025, however, everyone found out Josh Buice had created anonymous email accounts to smear various right-wing evangelicals. These included Voddie Baucham, a hardliner with the Old Guard faction of the SBC. Buice used one of his accounts to email accusations of Baucham’s financial wrongdoing to The Roys Report (an increasingly influential evangelical watchdog site; they didn’t take the bait though).
This wasn’t the only anonymous attack Buice had conducted from behind a mask. Nor was it even close to being his first. He’d been at this for years by then. According to Evangelical Dark Web, Buice also attacked Ascol himself, Doug Wilson, and John MacArthur. All of these people hold similar theological and culture-war views to Buice. Nobody could possibly construe any of these people as liberal evangelicals. Worse, Buice also attacked some of the people who had spoken at G3 Ministries conferences. These included Baucham, Ascol, and Buck.
After about two years of suspicions, Pray’s Mill finally connected the anonymous email accounts to Buice. It took them hours to drag the truth out of him. After he confessed, they suspended him as their pastor. In the wake of that confession, he lost both his pastor gig and his parachurch ministry. Since then, he’s been pretty quiet.
As well, G3 Ministries had to cancel its planned 2025 national conference, since many of Buice’s targets were on its guest speaker list.
The second point defines the line for G3 Ministries
After Buice resigned, four elders from Pray’s Mill assumed leadership of G3. One of those—Scott Aniol—became the new president of the group. After this change of leadership, it looks to me like G3 Ministries resumed Buice’s apparent animosity toward certain other Reformed leaders. That led to them mailing those packets.
For the anonymous packets’ return address, G3’s leaders used Buck’s own church address. Tom Ascol provided a photo of it on his Twitter account. But the packets were mailed from Dallas, which is a fair piece west of FBC. It’s also about a 12-hour drive from Douglasville, Georgia. Protestia wrote on August 17th that one of the new G3 leaders, Jon Norton, mailed the packets while in the Dallas area on a business trip. Norton apparently even used gloves to mail the packet. (Fingerprints. These guys were seriously worried their enemies would fingerprint-dust the envelopes to find them.)
The packets were 30 pages long. 27 pages comprised a database of what Buck had allegedly plagiarized. The senders stressed that they’d only listened to a small number of his sermons, so the actual level of plagiarism could be far worse than that.
When FBC didn’t do anything public about the plagiarism (read as: they didn’t publicly humiliate Tom Buck), that’s when the senders mailed copies to other leaders. One of them was Ascol—also from Dallas, and also using the FBC return address. Ascol says he called Buck after receiving it, and Buck at first denied knowing what Ascol was even talking about. After some prompting, Buck then remembered his elders and deacons getting similar packets “many months ago.” He said they’d handled it internally, but had also made a formal statement about it. (I couldn’t find the statement itself. It might have been communicated privately.)
The next week, Buck told Ascol that a former deacon from Pray’s Mill Baptist Church had told him that elders from there had sent the packets. After Protestia ran their August 17th story (relink), Ascol called an elder at Pray’s Mill. In his Twitter essay (relink), Ascol says the elder admitted everything.
Over time, Ascol questioned some of the pastors that elder named as consultants in the elders’ decision to go anonymous. None of those pastors confirmed advising the elders to act anonymously.
The fallout: G3 Ministries goes bye-bye
Faced with so much criticism, G3 Ministries didn’t have a lot of choice. Their reputation was in tatters. At least one pastor involved with G3 Ministries, Ethan Jago, quit the group after hearing about what had happened. In his August 19th post, Jago describes himself as a great friend of Tom Buck’s. I’m sure he wasn’t the only pastor abandoning the group, nor the only one counting Buck as a friend.
On August 25th, reports MinistryWatch, the four leaders of G3 posted a confession on Twitter. They admitted they’d sent those packets, apologized for having “sinfully meddled in the disciplinary process of your autonomous local church,” and expressed regret that they hadn’t approached FBC elders themselves with their concerns. In addition, they said they’d resigned from their pastor jobs at Pray’s Mill Baptist Church. I hear the four have fanned out to various other conservative evangelical churches. Scott Aniol, one of the elders, apparently also lost a seminary teaching job—timed coincidentally with the second scandal.
This latest scandal coincided with a period of very low income for G3 Ministries as well. They made their money on conferences. Just looking at one site covering G3 Ministries for the Church, Inc., we see they made $1.5M in 2021, $1.1M in 2022, $1.7M in 2023, and $1.2M in 2024. But in 2025, they reported only about $400k in income. That’s a huge drop. And it stood against a reported $951k of expenses.
Canceling the 2025 conference might have seemed like the thing to do. Maybe it even was. But it had a catastrophic impact on G3 Ministries’ income. There just wasn’t a way to come back from that kind of financial loss, any more than there was a way to come back from the reputation hit they’d taken. Without conferences, they had absolutely no path back to sustainable income—because no way and no how was their subscription service a money-maker.
So G3 Ministries closed its doors for good. The site is now a parking lot page announcing the closure. All of its previous URLs resolve to its closure announcement.
I’ve heard that the leaders sold their streaming service’s material to some unnamed church. It’ll be funny if that church tries to repurpose the material into yet another subscription service. Nobody asked for it or ever needed it, but it’s in the evangelical world now. So whatever is in it, it’s got to show up sooner or later.
Reformed theology is a hilarious mix of hypocrisy, unearned confidence, and unwarranted self-importance
A while ago, we talked about various Reformed hypocrites. It’s truly astonishing to see how many of them turn out to be that way, especially after confidently declaring that their approach to Jesusing is the only correct way to do it.
I figured out many, many years ago that the more hardline the Christian group, the more abusive its leaders are. The more intently Christians claim to follow the Bible, the more they seem to miss the entire point of their own religion. There’s a definite inverse relationship between a Christian’s absolute certainty of doctrinal correctness and their level of hypocrisy. And nobody, ever, has ever been more certain of doctrinal correctness than Reformed Christians.
Back when Reformed apologetics darling Sye Ten Bruggencate was acting like a horse’s ass to atheists in a 2014 debate, he took our breath away with just how incredibly nasty he was toward the very people his god had told him to love most.
Then, in 2021, Bruggencate lost his job and evangelicals’ esteem for committing what he described at the time as a “moral failure.” Protestia objected to that mild language, saying it was far worse than that. Having noticed the connections between nastiness, certainty, and hypocrisy, I’m completely certain it was.
Reformed theology itself opens the door to abuse
Usually, these scandals take the form of high-control and church-based abuse. Sye Ten Bruggencate’s example aside, it doesn’t always involve sexual abuse, even. Usually, it involves Reformed leaders’ abuse of church discipline. Church discipline is like a sexless BDSM TPE 24/7 relationship with church leaders as doms and church members as slaves. And it’s the practice that Reformed leaders insist will totally reverse Christianity’s decline.
Men with poor leadership skills gain complete unilateral power over other people, figure out the group lacks any real accountability measures, and something just happens in their heads. They just can’t help letting their inner dysfunctional-authoritarian ponies frolic freely in their groups’ fields.
And they do it with no fear of consequences, because their fellow leaders will protect them—guaranteed. Like other clutches of evangelical leaders, Reformed guys have a crony network in play. You’ll see familiar names popping up alongside each other, like Tom Buck, Tom Ascol, and many more. They share stages with each other, write blurbs for each other’s books, and give each other opportunities at conferences and whatnot.
Needless to say, they also protect each other.
So yes, of course John MacArthur allegedly egregiously mishandled domestic abuse reports from the women in his congregation, trying to force these women to stay with their husbands rather than helping them escape physical violence. Of course Reformed church Mars Hill always seemed to have rumors swirling about that kind of abuse. And of course J.D. Hall, founder of Pulpit and Pen (later renamed Protestia, seriously!), allegedly drove while incapacitated, embezzled church funds, abused prescription pills, and also beat his wife and children.
At this point, I’d be massively more surprised to hear of a loving, kindhearted, generous Reformed congregation led by a self-effacing, humble, peacemaking Reformed pastor than the opposite.
The leaders of G3 Ministries made some cardinal mistakes within their crony network
It takes a lot for one crony network member to ignore the plight of another. First and foremost, G3 Ministries’ leaders put themselves on the network’s “do not call” list primarily because they bet money on a losing horse.
Attacking strong leaders within the crony network is a very bad idea. If the leader has a good support base, the attack will fail. Ascol’s support base is, as far as I can tell, excellent.
As we’ll discuss next time, going anonymous was an even worse idea because their own power base was not immediately apparent. That allowed the leader whose base was very apparent to set the terms of engagement. Ascol did exactly that. In a very real sense, they set the shot up for him!
But even if they hadn’t made that mistake, Ascol outranked them by far. Every SBC-ling of note knows Tom Ascol’s name. Most of them probably even know Tom Buck’s. But I still can’t even remember the names of all four of the leaders of G3 Ministries, and I’ve been talking about them off and on for years now. I doubt that many evangelicals would know them at all.
The usefulness prong of the crony network rankings
Then we get into how useful G3 Ministries leaders were to their crony network. This is where things get interesting, because high rank within the network isn’t about actual formal ranks in any actual groups. Instead, it expresses that leader’s extreme usefulness to crony network members. A kingmaker (like the SBC’s Johnny Hunt) can be of supreme importance even if his actual formal rank isn’t all that high in his church organization.
I’d be completely bowled over to hear of any crony network leader acting against a useful, obedient network member just because it was the right thing to do. These guys circle the wagons better than any westbound settlers ever did.
The Reformed crony network cast out Sye Ten Bruggencate after his 2021 scandal. I’m sure nobody wept for him. He really is just that incredibly much of an asshole. More importantly, though, he hadn’t done anything really of note recently for the other network members. Who’s even heard of him in the past ten years? Not I, said the cat. Yes, they could safely cut him loose.
By contrast, Tom Buck is still useful to Tom Ascol and Ethan Jago. Thus, they supported him to the hilt despite his very obvious character deficits and unprofessional behavior. Don’t worry, though. Buck will find out what marvelous friends they are if he stops being so useful—or if powerful members of the network disavow him first.
The G3 Ministries leaders were clearly not terribly useful to Ascol. Whatever they gave him in terms of speaking engagements and other perks, it wasn’t worth taking their side against Tom Buck. When he got G3’s packet, I’ve no doubt Ascol spent a minute calculating the costs and benefits of taking each side, then made his decision.
G3 Ministries never moved the needle much in any direction, from what I could see. For most of us, they’ll just be a footnote in the overall book of Reformed scandals and hypocrisies.
But it’s a funny footnote. It involves no sex abuse, no children, and no bystanders. It’s just a Reformed-leaders-on-Reformed-leaders ruckus. We can all sit back and watch the spectacle with a perfectly clear conscience.
So let’s do just that.
NEXT UP: How Tom Ascol weaponized his tribe’s dislike of anonymity to help destroy G3. See you soon! <3
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