Josh Buice founded G3 Ministries, pastored Pray’s Mill Baptist Church for fifteen years, and spent three years running burner accounts against the same circle that later buried him. In May 2025 the elders confronted him, he lied for two hours, then confessed. He resigned the presidency. He resigned the pulpit. G3 canceled the 2025 conference, scrubbed his sermons, and treated anonymity itself as the unforgivable sin.
Those same elders spent 2026 running an anonymous smear against Tom Buck. Josh Buice looks less like a lone villain and more like a man who learned the house rules from the men who later condemned him. And G3 looks less like genuine brothers who were wrong on Christian Nationalism and more like petty tyrants clamoring to the top of a tiny kingdom.
What Happened After He Resigned
Pray’s Mill’s statement, later updated to record his resignation from the church, said the elders found “irrefutable evidence” that Buice had operated at least four anonymous social media accounts, two anonymous emails, and two Substacks for three years. They said those accounts were used to “publicly and anonymously slander numerous Christian leaders, including faithful pastors (some of whom have spoken at G3 conferences), several PMBC elders, and others.”
The confrontation was May 4, 2025. The elders had asked him about the accounts for two years. He denied them every time. On the night they brought the evidence, he denied them for two more hours. Then he confessed, said he was sorry, and said he wanted to ask forgiveness of everyone he had slandered.
The G3 board pushed him out on May 8. He resigned as a Pray’s Mill pastor on May 16. The church put him under a long process of counseling and discipline. G3 first said the sin was not necessarily permanently disqualifying and that his content would stay up. A day later the board reversed itself, declared that he had “stained the mission and character of G3 Ministries,” and purged every sermon, article, and video.
The 2025 national conference died with him. G3 said several scheduled speakers had been “sinfully targeted” by the accounts and that it would not force those men to appear at an event still tied to the man who had maligned them. Virgil Walker later left. Scott Aniol, the in-house successor, took the presidency in July 2025. Evangelical Dark Web said then that Aniol was more of the same, not a reset, and that the brand was already dead.
Buice’s first public statement came days after the fall. He apologized for “unsubstantiated and sinful remarks” against Voddie Baucham, said the claims were “without merit,” and said he had met Baucham privately to ask forgiveness. Tom Buck, then still on the G3 board, rejected the apology on the spot. Buck said Buice had not confessed the Julie Roys email because it had not yet surfaced, called the statement a minimization, and said he was “personally grieved by Josh’s lack of true repentance.”
That was the standard Pray’s Mill and G3 set. Anonymity was slander. Incomplete confession was fake repentance. The elders would decide when the fruit was enough.
Who The Accounts Hit
Pray’s Mill never named the elders Josh Buice attacked inside the church. The official language stopped at “several PMBC elders.” The public record outside the building is clearer.
Founders Ministries said, “a large percentage of his wicked words and actions were directed at Founders Ministries, our President, Tom Ascol, and his family.” That is the heaviest institutional claim on the record. Founders pulled Buice’s content and said his actions disqualified him from spiritual leadership.
Voddie Baucham was the most documented individual target. Writing as “Tom Smith,” Buice emailed The Roys Report in December 2024 and asked Julie Roys to chase two claims: that Baucham had misappropriated more than a million dollars from the $1.4 million GoFundMe raised for his 2021 heart surgery, and that major sections of Fault Lines had been ghostwritten from James Lindsay. Roys asked “Tom Smith” if he had firsthand knowledge. Nobody answered. Evangelical Dark Web covered the email when it surfaced and called it what it was. When Josh Buice wanted a hit piece on Baucham and Ascol, he took the rumor to a feminist outlet that makes a living off pastor-hunting.
The identified burners were Grant Hawthorne (@Wikipreacher) and Secrets in the Shadows (@BigEvaSecrets). Those accounts went after Tom Ascol, John MacArthur and The Master’s Seminary, and Doug Wilson. The documented gripes were not liberal talking points. Hawthorne unironically accused Ascol of running an anon army. The accounts hammered TMS for Hillsong on a chapel playlist and for hiring Peter Sammons after an alleged plagiarism firing. Josh Buice, who spent years scolding anonymous accounts in public, used anonymity to punch rivals and to needle his own conservative circuit from the right.
G3 later admitted the 2025 speaker list included men Josh Buice had targeted. The board never published a full victim list. The named names that survived the official fog are Ascol and his family, Baucham, Founders, MacArthur’s orbit, Wilson, fellow Pray’s Mill elders, and other G3 speakers left unnamed because naming them would have made the conference cancellation even uglier.
Pray’s Mills And The Repentance They Refused
In August 2026, after the Tom Buck dossier blew open, Phil Johnson wrote “Haman’s Gallows.” Johnson had been a G3 ally from the beginning. He is not a Christian Nationalist partisan looking for a scalp. He is the man who used to love the conference.
Johnson said the men still running Pray’s Mill and G3 “have refused to accept Josh Buice’s expressions of repentance and want to dictate for him what his repentance should look and sound like.” Then he said the quiet part. “This case shows they are not qualified to make judgments like that.”
That is the verdict from inside their own former coalition. The elders did not merely discipline Buice. They kept the penance open, reserved the right to reject his confession, and used that posture as proof of their own holiness. Johnson’s point is that men who will not receive repentance, and who then run their own anonymous campaign, have no standing to sit as the court of fruit-inspection.
People have been leaving over it. On August 16, hours before Protestia published, Pastor Matt Sikes ended the evening service by warning the congregation that an article was coming. The transcript of that announcement is the tell. Sikes named “people who recently left our church, specifically Jonathan Frazier and Jarrod Wilson,” accused them of “spreading rumors about our church from the outside,” and then claimed that former members had already told Protestia “we didn’t handle the Josh Buice situation correctly, according to them.” Protestia said that last claim was a fabrication. The rest of the speech was damage control. Sikes called Protestia “a sort of a gossip online blog,” admitted the elders had refused to comment, and then folded the coming exposure into 1 Peter, saying Satan wanted to keep attacking the church. He framed the leavers as rumor mills and the reporters as the devil. He did not frame the open wound as the elders’ refusal to receive Buice’s repentance. Members walked. The pulpit answered by calling their exit spiritual warfare.
The Buck Dossier Exposed The Court
Less than a year after they condemned Josh Buice for anonymous targeting, Pray’s Mill and G3 ran another one.
In March 2026, an anonymous packet landed on the elders and roughly thirty deacons of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas. It accused Tom Buck of serial sermon plagiarism. Months later the same dossier went out to parachurch ministries, including Protestia, claiming Lindale had refused to deal with “public sin biblically.” The envelopes used FBC Lindale’s name and return address. They were mailed from Texas. Protestia reported that Pray’s Mill elder and sitting G3 board member Jon Norton was personally involved, that he used latex gloves so the packets would not take fingerprints, and that all of the Pray’s Mill elders knew.
Lindale investigated. Buck recused himself. Outside pastors were consulted, including Johnson. The church found a real attribution problem in commentary use, not a pastor preaching other men’s finished sermons. Buck tightened the practice, confessed to his congregation, and the local church closed the matter. Johnson called it traffic-ticket plagiarism, the kind produced by haste and sloppy notes, not horse theft. Protestia reviewed the same dossier and reached the same conclusion: the packet overstated the evidence in order to smear Buck. And Evangelical Dark Web was unmoved by the offense.
The cover letter lied about process. It claimed the accusers had presented the material to Lindale and been ignored. What they had done was mail anonymous packets to men’s houses and then treat the silence of an unknown accuser as proof the church had failed. When FBC Lindale asked Pray’s Mill and G3 for a meeting after the story was about to break, those boards did not answer.
Pray’s Mill’s response to its own congregation was to warn them that Protestia was coming, refuse comment, and talk about Satan attacking the church. That is not repentance language. That is damage control.
Ethan Jago resigned as a G3 pastor-theologian and pulled his church off the network. Johnson called for G3 to dissolve. Evangelical Dark Web reported the Norton campaign as a retaliatory shadow operation against a former board member who had already left over post-Buice leadership.
These are the men who told the world Josh Buice’s anonymity was uniquely wicked.
Buice Was Condemned Harder Than The House Deserved To Condemn Him
Josh Buice sinned. He lied to his elders for two years and again on the night they had the proof. He preached against burner accounts while running them. He sent Julie Roys a tip he later called unfounded. None of that disappears because G3 later embarrassed itself.
The question is severity, and who got to measure it.
Pray’s Mill and G3 did not discipline Buice because every claim was false. Protestia later noted that some of the anonymous material, including the Roys email, was treated as slander because it was anonymous, not because it had been disproven on the merits. Anonymity became the crime. Incomplete confession became proof the heart was still dark. Content was purged. The conference was killed. The founder was erased. Tom Buck, before he was the next target, stood in public and voided the apology.
Then the same elder board ran a dirtier operation. Norton’s packet did not just hide a name. It forged a Texas origin, stole Lindale’s return address, and used gloves. The goal was not a private Matthew 18 conversation. The goal was to get Buck thrown out of ministry without G3’s fingerprints on the envelope. That is worse tradecraft than a Twitter burner. It is also the same sin they had just used to destroy the man who built their platform.
Johnson is right. Men who refuse repentance and then build their own gallows are not qualified to decide what Buice still owes.
The context around Josh Buice makes the original sentence look even more like institutional theater. He was not serving in a clean house that suddenly discovered one rotten pastor. He was serving alongside Scott Aniol, who promoted Tobias Riemenschneider’s slander of Joel Webbon and deleted the post without a real apology. He was serving in the same G3 culture that spent 2023 and 2024 punching Christian Nationalists with James Lindsay’s talking points, slandering Stephen Wolfe from the platform, and removing Michael O’Fallon from the board. Evangelical Dark Web called that operation Mid Eva: market-share posturing dressed up as discernment. Buice’s burners were the private version of the same instinct. Keep the big names close. Knife rivals in the dark. Protect the conference.
Pray’s Mill’s later record on its own members fits the same pattern. When former G3 board chairman Jon Frazier brought a complaint against Pastor Matt Sikes, the elders declared the accusations false in eight days, turned the process on Frazier’s wife and daughter, and said leaving without their prescribed repentance was “not an option.” Thirteen days later they dropped the threat and let the family go. Scott Aniol treated a disputed account from former members Danny and Lisa Sewell as slander and demanded they recant. These are men who weaponize Matthew 18 and 1 Timothy 5:19 when the accusation points at an elder, then invent extra-biblical penance when the accusation points down.
Buice’s secrecy is more understandable in that room. He was a Mid Eva operator inside a ministry that already ran shadow campaigns, already treated disagreement as division, and already cared more about speaker lists than about saying hard things with a name attached, and, by obvious extension, the Maker of all things. That does not make the Roys email righteous. It makes the sackcloth from Aniol, Norton, and Sikes cheap. They did not cast out a wolf from a healthy eldership. They punished the man who got caught playing their game in public.
G3 promised, after Buice fell, that it believed in “partnership over platform” and cooperation instead of competition. Then it mailed a forged dossier at Tom Buck. The DNA Johnson asked about was never a mystery. Evangelical Dark Web said in May 2025 that Buice’s burners had damaged the last of G3’s credibility and that the ministry likely had no path forward. The Buck operation is the proof. The men who would not accept Buice’s repentance were busy proving they never hated the method. They hated that it was his name on the accounts instead of theirs.
One Response
Maybe Virgil Walker will be more forthcoming now with his reasons for resignation. Wondering if he and Buck may have been the only principled board members.
Tom Buck has certainly been under attack for the past few years. The dangers of not falling in line with the Big Eva narrative.