A Beautiful Picture Of The Church (or... A Lesson From Vincent Van Gogh's Life)

Before he became one of the greatest and most innovative painters of the 19th century, Vincent Van Gogh desperately wanted to be in the ministry.  In his mid twenties he abandoned his career as an art dealer to go into ministry training to be a pastor like his father.  We can never really be sure what went wrong, but the exceptionally intelligent Van Gogh could never get his head around his studies and failed out of school.  The state church would not even consider making him a pastor.  They wouldn't even financially support him to be a missionary (it wasn't just his lack of knowledge that led to this, his rejection of materialism, and his radical attempts to identify with the poor and dejected didn't sit well with the upper class clergy.  Add to that his abrasive nature, spiritual intensity, and fits of melancholy made the church nervous.  It also sounds like he was a pretty awful preacher - in that he was long winded, scattered in his thoughts and boring).  The best he could do was become a volunteer missionary who would have to undergo constant evaluations to see if he would be allowed to stay on the field.  Maybe, if he did a great job, they would start supporting him... maybe.