A Pair of Important Lessons from the Demise of G3

A year and a half ago, I wrote about G3 and the shocking news that its founder, Josh Buice, had resigned as both the leader of G3 and the pastor of the associated Pray’s Mill Baptist Church after it was proven that he had been anonymously slandering other Christian leaders online. I told about my involvement in the first eight years of the G3 conference and the reason I stopped being invited to it. If you’d like to read that, you can do so at “You, Me, and G3.” I concluded the article by saying, “I appreciated and enjoyed what G3 once was and would love to see it revisit the spirit it displayed when it was founded. I would be thrilled if G3’s best days and greatest contributions to the kingdom lie not in the past but in the future.”

Sadly, it was not to be. Last month it came out that all four elders of Pray’s Mill Baptist Church were involved in circulating anonymous packages containing damaging material about another pastor and his church’s process of discipline and restoration. The men apologized after their actions came to light, then resigned as elders and swiftly wound down G3. G3’s site, once a significant source for videos and articles, now says simply this: “This Site Is Offline. G3 Ministries is concluding its operations. Thank you for your patience.” It’s a sad ending to what was once a helpful ministry, and it leads to a pair of important lessons I believe we would all be wise to learn from the demise of G3.

In the aftermath of the first scandal, an individual who was associated with the organization reached out to me and we discussed the situation. I expressed my concern that, while the leadership of G3 had rightly moved very quickly to remove Buice from his position of leadership, I saw no indication that the remaining members of the organization were engaged in significant soul-searching to consider whether they had contributed their own sins to Buice’s or whether the sin he exhibited had been seeded right into the organization. Because I was not part of it and was not asked for counsel, there was not much I could do beyond expressing these concerns and hoping others were echoing them.

I don’t know if the leadership ever did that kind of soul-searching, but the events of the past month would seem to indicate that either they did not, or they did not do so sufficiently. Though the two sins happened a year apart, they were of a similar kind, involving secrecy, meddling, accusation, and a failure to go directly to a brother. The pattern that doomed the organization was not greatly different from the one its leaders had taken public action against only one year prior.

“The apple does not fall far from the tree” applies not only to fathers and their children, but also to founders and their organizations. This is the first lesson: just as a founder’s strengths will be embedded in the organization he creates, so will his weaknesses. Just as his strengths may be integral in causing that organization to rise, his weaknesses may be integral in causing it to fall. Thus, a wise leader tries to gain an awareness of his weaknesses and in some way to oppose or mitigate them, perhaps through policy, through limiting his position, or by hiring people whose strengths counter his weaknesses. When that leader leaves his position, and especially if he does so through scandal and disqualification, the organization ought to carefully examine itself to see if and how those weaknesses are part of its very fabric.

A companion to that old adage might go something like this: “The men who cut down the tree were felled by the same axe.” That is the second lesson: even those who rightly judge and discipline a person for committing a particular sin are not necessarily protected from committing it themselves. The moment of condemning a sin in another person is a moment of danger, since we often fail to hold ourselves to the standards to which we hold others, and we tend to be blinded to our own sins even when we see others’ with clarity. Frankly, I feel this danger in writing this very article.

I would like to think that if G3 had gone through a careful process of self-examination, it might have avoided disgracing itself and bringing reproach on the name of the Lord. The leaders could have brought in outside voices or proceeded through a guided process of uncovering and uprooting sinfulness. They could have exerted effort in mortifying organizational sin in just the ways every Christian mortifies personal sin—by pleading God’s grace, examining the organization in light of God’s Word, and applying to it God’s gospel. Perhaps they did all of this. Yet somehow they failed to see that there must have been systemic issues within the organization that had not been remedied simply by removing its leader. Taking a right and necessary action is not the same as taking sufficient action.

The truth is, there is only one kind of leader in this world, and that’s a flawed leader. Of course, God is gracious, and not every flawed leader will end up being a disqualified leader. Yet even the best will have weaknesses. The wise among these flawed leaders are the ones who are most aware of their flaws and who actively seek them out, take action against them, and invite others to do the same. When they are at their best, they prepare for the time they may be at their worst. They share God’s eagerness in putting their sin to death and apply the means he provides.

I wrote in my previous article that “God’s cause in this world needs no conferences or parachurch organizations, but it does often benefit from them.” The church benefited from G3 for a time, but those days are done. One man’s pattern of sin harmed the organization, but it was the remaining leaders’ repetition of the pattern, and their failure to put it to death, that finally doomed it. Let’s not fail to consider that, whether in our lives or in the organizations we create, sin runs deep. Thankfully, God’s grace runs deeper, and he makes it available to us if we will simply plead for it, take hold of it, and apply it.