The collapse of G3 Ministries marks the end of an era, though a bad one. In this Evangelical Dark Web special, we will explore the rise and fall of G3 Ministries and why there will never be a G3 again.
G3 Ministries started as a conference in 2013 because Josh Buice wanted an alternative to the church growth circuit. Gospel, Grace, and Glory. That is what the three Gs stood for. The first event was held on the campus of Pray’s Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Georgia, where Buice had been pastor since 2010. About 750 people showed up. The brand later claimed thousands, then as many as 8,000, once the names on the posters got big enough. The men who ran it were never those names.
G3 was Mid Eva from the start. Josh Buice, Scott Aniol, Michael O’Fallon, and the rest of the Pray’s Mill orbit did not have the stature of the men they booked. They rented the influence of great men to make names for themselves. The conference grew. The nonprofit followed. The church network, the press, the podcasts, and the board seats followed after that. Over time the rental expired. The operators were exposed. The brand died anyway.
The Conference Before The Ministry
Josh Buice founded G3 as a theology conference aimed at pastors. The pitch was Scripture over pragmatism. In those years, that was a real market. Together for the Gospel still existed. The Gospel Coalition still had a conservative costume. A lot of Reformed Baptists wanted a room that sounded like John MacArthur without having to fly to Southern California every time.
The early speaker list is the whole business model. Tim Challies spoke at the first conference and then for eight straight years. Steve Lawson was a fixture. Paul Washer. Voddie Baucham. James White. Phil Johnson. Tom Ascol. Joel Beeke, Conrad Mbewe, Ken Ham, and Mike Riccardi filled slots. John MacArthur headlined when the event got large enough to need him. In the wide-net years, the posters also carried David Platt, Paul Tripp, Mark Dever, and John Piper. Those men were not G3. They were the draw. Buice was the local pastor who got to stand in the same brochure.
Attendance did what rented celebrity always does. Hundreds became thousands. The event left the church campus for a convention center. In 2019 and 2020, the conference incorporated as G3 Ministries, a 501(c)(3). The national gathering later went biennial, with smaller regional events in between. G3 Press followed. The Gloria Deo Journal of Theology followed. The G3 Church Network followed, asking pastors to affirm the 1689 London Baptist Confession and the Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. Pray’s Mill eventually left the Southern Baptist Convention, and the network became a home for churches that wanted the same exit with a conference brand attached.
Scott Aniol arrived in 2021 as executive vice president and editor-in-chief. He founded Religious Affections Ministries and ran it as executive director. The site produced material from around 2004 to 2021. Aniol himself dated the ministry to 2008. The stated mission was to help churches “conserve and nourish historic, biblical Christianity” by teaching the Bible on truth, goodness, beauty, and “rightly ordered affections” in life and ministry. In practice, that meant conservative worship polemics. Hymnody over contemporary music. Aesthetics as theology. Culture and philosophy lectures aimed at pastors who already hated the Gettys-to-Hillsong pipeline. Weekly articles, books, curricula, and Aniol’s podcast, By the Waters of Babylon
Aniol shut down Religious Affections Ministries and rolled the project into G3. Aniol brought worship polemics, a fundamentalist network, and the posture of a man who had been waiting for a bigger letterhead. Virgil Walker came in through the Just Thinking podcast with Darrell Harrison and later sat as executive director of operations. Tom Buck, formerly of Pulpit and Pen and pastor of First Baptist Church Lindale, sat on the board. Michael O’Fallon sat on the board. The Pray’s Mill elders sat underneath the whole machine. The platform was national. The men running it were still a Georgia church with a good booking agent.
Safe Conferences, Dead Horses
G3’s growth strategy was safety to the point of uselessness. The national events sold the big names. The rest of the calendar was niche theological conferences on tired subjects that had already been beaten to death in Reformed Baptist rooms for twenty years. Cessationism. Worship style. Another round of anti-charismatic certainty. Another round of complementarian talking points that nobody in the room disputed. Another regional event that existed so the in-house men could take the stage after MacArthur and Washer had gone home.
That banality is why G3’s own personalities never built massive brands. Buice was not MacArthur. Aniol was not Washer. Walker was not Baucham. They had access to the same crowds those men drew, and they spent it on dead-horse topics that could not make a new name. A conference can rent a reputation. It cannot transfer one. The audience came for the headliners and left with a tote bag. The operators stayed Mid Eva because they chose the safest possible product: recycled certainty, no risk, no original authority.
When the social justice fight arrived, G3 finally had a live issue. Critical Race Theory, the Dallas Statement, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s compromise gave the brand a reason to exist beyond hymn debates. Even then, the instinct was gatekeeping, not leadership. They wanted the credit for opposing wokeness without paying the cost of saying anything that would cost them a speaker.
The Names They Rented
The biggest names G3 ever put on a stage were John MacArthur, Voddie Baucham, Paul Washer, and Steve Lawson. Those four men could fill a hall without G3 attached. James White, Ken Ham, Phil Johnson, Tom Ascol, Joel Beeke, and Conrad Mbewe were the next tier, serious enough to make the posters look heavy. Challies was the writer who made the early years feel collegial. Owen Strachan was the later addition who showed what the platform was becoming.
G3 did not create those ministries. It borrowed them. Buice edited a book on the New Calvinism with contributions from men more famous than he was. The conference positioned itself as the conservative remainder of that movement once Together for the Gospel came apart. The Master’s Seminary and HeartCry could be listed as partners. The local pastor in Douglasville got to talk like he was in their league.
G3 was a Big Eva platform whose personalities were Mid Eva by comparison. Josh Buice was a much smaller figure than the guests pulled in for the conference. The same was true of Aniol, O’Fallon, and the Pray’s Mill elders. They kept the big names close. They used the proximity to build a board, a network, a press, and a reputation as gatekeepers. Then they spent the next decade proving they were not the men on the banner.
Christian Nationalism And The Rehabilitation Of Owen Strachan
G3’s public theology was always the weak joint. Evangelical Dark Web noted years ago that the organization was nowhere when the government was locking down churches, except to police how churches conducted worship online. That changed after John MacArthur stood up. The same pattern returned on Christian Nationalism. The men who had rented MacArthur’s anti-woke credibility turned around and treated a Christian civil order as a threat.
Josh Buice asked how many of his friends wanted a Protestant pope. Scott Aniol called Christian Nationalism the new Young, Restless, and Reformed, then argued that the only institution that can technically be called Christian is a church of baptized believers. Michael O’Fallon brought James Lindsay’s atheist framework into the room and used it against brothers. A Christian government was framed as tyranny. The actual tyrannies of the last decade, from public health decrees to the sexual revolution, were treated as someone else’s problem.
The 2023 conference made the strategy public. G3 sold a preconference that was supposed to bring clarity on Christian Nationalism. What it brought was Owen Strachan. Strachan had already spent years as a lightweight who needed rehabilitation after years of being woke. G3 gave him the platform anyway. During the event he attacked Stephen Wolfe as a kinist, the Mid Eva buzzword for racist. It was slander from the stage. The point was not theology. The point was to malign Wolfe and the broader Christian Nationalist movement with woke labels, so Mid Eva could keep policing the right.
The lecture did more damage to G3 than to Wolfe. Strachan argued against the ordo amoris, treated multiculturalism as a good, and reached for the same racism smear that Critical Race Theory had already worn out. Mid Eva had picked up Big Eva’s tactics. Accuse the other side of kinism, ethnocentrism, and fascism. Skip the exegesis. Protect the conference. Owen Strachan was and still is quite woke.
That opposition to Christian Nationalism is also the setup for the later hypocrisy at Pray’s Mill. G3 spent years warning that Christian civil government would produce tyrants. Then the elders of the church that birthed G3 ran their own congregation like petty tyrants. They refused repentance. They turned Matthew 18 into a weapon against members. They mailed anonymous packets when a former board member would not stay in line. The men who called a Christian magistrate dangerous could not even govern a Baptist church without gloves and forged return addresses.
O’Fallon Walked Toward Christless Conservatism
Michael O’Fallon was one of the operators who helped assemble the coalition. Sovereign Nations. New Discourses. A board seat at G3. Ties to Alpha and Omega Ministries under James White. A place in the Conservative Baptist Network. He had signed the Dallas Statement. He had the anti-Critical Race Theory résumé. He also spent that capital on James Lindsay, an atheist whose project was never the church. With O’Fallon’s backing, James Lindsay would promote homosexuality, abortion, and modern gender theory, including a delineation between sex and gender.
In June 2023, G3 quietly took O’Fallon off the board. After the story moved, O’Fallon announced that he had resigned in one day from G3 Ministries, Alpha and Omega Ministries, and the Conservative Baptist Network. He blamed lies, disinformation, and political gamesmanship. He claimed ministries should not have to answer for his name. The cleaner reading is the one the record supports. O’Fallon pursued Christless conservatism, the Lindsay project of policing Christians to conserve 2015 liberalism, and that pursuit made him incompatible with even the compromised institutions he had been sitting on. He did not leave to recover the gospel. He left to keep a political operation that did not need a church. And thankfully, O’Fallon’s influence has only waned, as his exit of Mid Eva board was a miscalculation of the size of his influence alone.
What Happened To Josh Buice
Josh Buice founded G3 Ministries, pastored Pray’s Mill Baptist Church for fifteen years, and spent at least 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.
Pray’s Mill’s statement 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. Those accounts were used to slander Christian leaders, including faithful pastors, several Pray’s Mill elders, and others. 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 again. Then he confessed and said he wanted to ask forgiveness.
The G3 board pushed him out on May 8. He resigned as a Pray’s Mill pastor on May 16. 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.
Buice apologized for unsubstantiated and sinful remarks against Voddie Baucham and said he had met Baucham privately. Tom Buck, then still on the board, rejected the apology on the spot. Founders Ministries said a large percentage of Buice’s wicked words and actions were directed at Founders, Tom Ascol, and Ascol’s family. Writing as “Tom Smith,” Buice had emailed The Roys Report in December 2024 and asked Julie Roys to chase claims that Baucham had misappropriated GoFundMe money and that Fault Lines had been ghostwritten from James Lindsay. When 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 and Secrets in the Shadows. Those accounts went after Tom Ascol, John MacArthur and The Master’s Seminary, and Doug Wilson. Buice, who spent years scolding anonymous accounts in public, used anonymity to punch rivals and to needle his own circle.
Scott Aniol took the presidency in July 2025. This signaled G3’s commitment to more of the same. But the brand was dead.
Walker And Buck Abandoned Ship
Virgil Walker and Tom Buck were not the same kind of men. Walker had been one of G3’s public faces, a Just Thinking host and later the executive director of operations. He wrote against Wolfe in 2023 and used the ethnocentrism charge that Mid Eva was then recycling. That was a real failure. It is also not the whole file. After Buice fell, Walker left. He did not stay to inherit the wreckage. He did not take the presidency. He went back to local church ministry while Aniol climbed into the chair. That is what an honorable exit looks like in a collapsing brand. He abandoned ship instead of becoming the next face of a dead conference. Additionally, Walker’s writings are much better than when he was at G3.
Tom Buck had spoken at G3 and sat on the board. He was hard on Buice in public when the burner accounts broke, which put him on the record inside the house. Then he left over the post-Buice leadership. The remaining Pray’s Mill elders and G3 board answered that departure with a shadow campaign. In 2026 they mailed an anonymous plagiarism dossier to First Baptist Church in Lindale, stole the church’s return address, and tried to get Buck thrown out of ministry without fingerprints. Jon Norton used latex gloves. The other elders knew. Lindale investigated, found sloppy commentary use rather than horse theft, and closed the matter. Phil Johnson called it traffic-ticket plagiarism. Buck looks like what G3’s later propaganda needed him not to be: a man who got off the boat before the rest of the crew started forging mail.
The Elders Who Called Tyranny And Then Practiced It
The Pray’s Mill elders spent 2026 running an anonymous smear against Tom Buck. Phil Johnson, a G3 ally from the beginning, wrote that the Pray’s Mill elders had refused to accept Buice’s expressions of repentance and wanted to dictate what that repentance should look like. Then Johnson said they were not qualified to make judgments like that.
That is the verdict from inside their own former coalition. Matt Sikes warned the congregation that Protestia was coming, named members who had left, and projected the exposure as spiritual warfare. When former G3 board chairman Jon Frazier brought a complaint against 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 the other Pray’s Mill elders. Aniol. Norton. Sikes. Joyner. The men around Buice who inherited the platform and then copied the method they had just used to destroy him. 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 partnership over platform and cooperation instead of competition. Then it mailed a forged dossier at Tom Buck.
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. That does not make the Roys email righteous. It makes the sackcloth from Aniol, Norton, Joyner, and Sikes cheap.
The actions of the Pray’s Mills elders would be the official end of G3 as they ceased all operations in August 2026, including their 2027 conference.
The Broken Down Business Model
G3 Ministries operated in a space where relationships were the biggest barrier to entry, which is to say there was very little stopping a competitor from copying the same playbook to build a similar brand name. The one that comes to mind is Clear Truth Media, which was launched in 2024 by Steven Whitlow with the aim at being a biblical alternative to The Gospel Coalition.
Like G3 Ministries, Clear Truth sought big names for speakers. Although 2024 did not feature any A list speakers, 2025 built upon it by landing Steve Deace, in addition to its usual lineup. In 2026, Clear Truth landed 2 A listers, Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, and also the notable inclusions, Frank Turek and Rob McCoy. However, despite this, the conference did not exceed the church basement in size.
Clear Truth Media relied on collaboration to astroturf itself, but consistent content requires some level of compensation for writers. CTM relied on volunteers to write in their spare time and soon they found themselves with little content. In 2026, CTM’s websites would be defunct.
Clear Truth Media attempted to run the same playbook as G3 Ministries, but they neglected banality in their rise to the top. Additionally, CTM was double minded in its personalities and ultimately catered to a “third way” between The Gospel Coalition and Christian Nationalism which proved to have a dwindling market. With the death of major Evangelical figures, like Tim Keller, John MacArthur, and Voddie Baucham, and the public disgrace of Steve Lawson, the pool of which to replicate G3’s strategy has shrunk, and the fragmentation of media likely means that the era of celebrity pastors as we know it is over, or at the very least drastically changing.
The Rental Came Due
G3 did not collapse because one pastor got caught with burner accounts. It collapsed because Mid Eva spent a decade renting the reputations of MacArthur, Baucham, Washer, Lawson, and the rest, then spent the borrowed authority on safe conferences, woke tactics against Christian Nationalists, and petty control at Pray’s Mill.
The beginning was a Georgia church conference with better guests than hosts. The operators were Josh Buice, Scott Aniol, Michael O’Fallon, and the Pray’s Mill elders. They made names by standing next to great men. They never became those men, because the product was banal and the instinct was gatekeeping. Owen Strachan’s 2023 slander of Stephen Wolfe told on the brand. O’Fallon’s same-day resignations told on the coalition. Walker and Buck leaving told on the ship. Buice’s burners and the elders’ later packet told on the house.
The writing was on the wall in 2023. The realization arrived in 2026. G3 canceled what was left, shut the network, deleted the accounts, and went offline. The great men on the old posters still have ministries. The Mid Eva men who rented them do not. And Evangelicalism is better for it.
The story of G3 is a cautionary tale about sordid men who squandered everything they built to defend secular pluralism and their own petty church fiefdoms.
One Response
I read that Tom Buck used a plagiarized story about man and wife as if it was describing his own marriage. If true, the plagiarism is more serious than represented. We are rightly upset when leftist leaning pastors plagiarize. Though this was discovered in a reprehensible way, it still needs to be investigated. Most of those giving Buck a pass are his friends. Our society, including the church, is way too tolerant of this sin – stealing the intellectual property of others.