The time that Vincent van Gogh spent in the Borinage area of Belgium was one of the most intense episodes of his life, and can be recognized as the true turning point in both his art and his religion.
At the outset (in late 1877 through early 1878) of this brief era, van Gogh had been studying theology in Amsterdam, with intentions of becoming a minister, like his father. After only a year, however, his obstinate fixation on living a strictly Christ-like, humble and lowly existence and his refusal to be taught or criticized by his professors led to his abandonment of theological 
school. According to biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, it was during this time of rejecting formal religious school that Vincent came upon the mining community in the Borinage, and seemed to find his religious purpose. His reaction, fueled by his constant idolization of the humble life, venerated the miners: “What grand people they were! His intuition was right; the miner was another peasant of the stock that Millet [van Gogh’s favorite artist] had painted, that Jesus had chosen – oppressed but truly virtuous, the rock on which humanity was built” (Hanson 45). Idealizing these people, and seeing in them the type of identification with Christ he craved so deeply, van Gogh decided at once to seek an appointment to serve as a missionary among them.
In December of 1878, van Gogh was granted his request, and was given a temporary post as a lay preacher in the village of Wasmes, reaching out with the Gospel to the miners of the Belgian Borinage. Giving his all to this task, Vincent finally found joy in his work and felt happiness in his operations as “an official servant of God” by visiting the poor, feeding the hungry, and preaching to uplift the souls of the suffering miners and their families (Hanson 47). He began to question himself, however. While he internally shared in the trials of the mining people and remained psychologically humble and lowly, he was not doing so physically and literally. To truly follow Christ’s example, van Gogh felt the need to imitate His life (as he wrote to his brother, 
Theo, in late December of 1876) as “a workman and labourer whose life is hard. Because He Himself [Jesus] is the great Man of Sorrows who knows our ills […] Who laboured for 30 years in a humble carpenter’s shop to fulfill God’s will” (L127.1). In keeping with this personal religious conviction, van Gogh decided to make his life this “hard,” and strictly “labour” among his prospective converts. He soon gave up his rented room in return for the dreariest hut in the village, gave away all his clothes, his small amount of money, and his bed, lived only on scraps of bread, and went down into the mine to experience the people’s difficult life (Hanson 47). The more he lowered himself to live among the people he wished to serve, the more disturbed and worried the church leaders became, particularly when he began teaching more about Jesus’ complete love and forgiveness for all people and less specific official Church doctrine. As Ronald de Leeuw records in his edition of van Gogh’s letters, by July of 1879, the Church council had reprimanded Vincent and dismissed him from his ministerial post (Leeuw 60). By trying to follow what he thought was Christ’s example, van Gogh found only the Church’s rejection of his ministry.
After this dismissal, Vincent van Gogh went through a period of confusion and depression, visiting his family only briefly before disappearing for almost a year. During this time, wandering from place to place, without work and deeply hurt, van Gogh did not communicate with his family, not even sending his usual letters to Theo. Finally, after almost a year, van Gogh penned a letter to Theo in July of 1880. With a rather changed character, he wrote of the organized Church:
"You should know that it is the same with evangelists as it is with artists. There is an old academic school, often odious and tyrannical, the ‘abomination of desolation’, in short, men who dress, as it were, in a suit of steel armour, a cuirass, of prejudice 
and convention. Where they are in charge, it is they who hand out the jobs and try, with much red tape, to keep them for their protégés and exclude the man with the open mind.
Their God is like the God of Shakespeare’s drunken Falstaff, ‘the inside of a church’." (L133.2)
Having lost his appointment, van Gogh also lost his faith in the Church. Fed up with the “prejudice and convention” of the evangelist leaders, van Gogh utterly rejected “Their God” and their supremacy in his life. He writes later in this letter how a feeling of “melancholy” overtook him because of this disillusionment, and how the Church now seemed “empty” for him (L133.3). Yet, even in his disgust with organized religion, Vincent exclaims out, “How long, my God!” (L133.3).
It is here, at the end of his attempt at ministry and the beginning of an intermittent fallout with his family, where van Gogh’s religious struggle breaks forth. It would be merely three years later that he would return to live for a short time with his parents in Nuenen.