Finally, in Old Church Tower at Nuenen (“The Peasants’ Churchyard”) van Gogh’s rejection of the organized Church appears complete, and his sorrowful longing for God has led him to search for consolation outside its decrepit influence. By the time of its rendering – late May and early June of 1885, a year after the previous work – the tower had fallen into complete disrepair. As the painting shows, the steeple is now gone, windows are boarded up, and weeds have grown up around its foundation and yard. Chipped and cracked, the tower walls sag and stumble in the field, visited only by the birds who have officially made the building their full-time home. In fact, these animals are the only signs of life around the tower: van Gogh depicts no human figure visiting the church building this time. Why? Pictured in shambles, utterly disemboweled and abandoned, van Gogh proclaims through this work his complete rejection of the organized Church. In this last painting, not only does he turn his back on the organized Church, but he also intensifies the message by leaving the building entirely alone. The crosses of the graves are silhouetted on either side of the church, perhaps suggesting the demise of the people who populate van Gogh’s previous works and emphasizing the death of this church, as well as the Church in general. 
Tsukasa Kodera astutely notes this symbolism in Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature, proposing that the artist’s negative portrayal of “the old church tower [represents his view] of the theologian’s God or traditional Christianity” (Kodera 42). While Kodera sees van Gogh’s anti-Church message through this death, though, he misses van Gogh’s more positive hope in this. The familiar wall still appears in this image, running behind the building from left to right, but it no longer blocks the viewer from the tower – it has lost its power to block out people. This dying, then, actually opens up religion to all, rather than shutting them out, and is considered by van Gogh to be part of a cyclical process of life. He expressed this when he wrote to Theo in early June of 1885 about his purpose in the painting:
"I wanted to express how those ruins show that for ages the peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive – I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of earth dug up – a wooden cross. […] And now those ruins tell me how a faith and a religion mouldered away – strongly founded though they were – but how the life and the death of the [people] remain forever the same, budding and withering regularly, like the grass and the flowers growing there in that churchyard. “Les religions passent, Dieu demeure” [Religions pass away, God remains]." (L411.1)
For van Gogh, the abandonment of this church echoes the deaths of the people buried in its yard, and signifies the absolute failure of the organized Church, as expressed in the fifth line. While the artist recognized in this letter that once the Church had been stable and strong, properly focused and personally applicable, its death has occurred just as naturally and simply as those of the peasants – living and dying in this same field. Tsukasa Kodera mentions this idea in his book as well, focusing on “the contrast between the ruin, […] the transience of religion and the eternity of human life cycles” (Kodera 42). Yet, Kodera’s analysis stops here, missing the artist’s more far-reaching message. van Gogh’s writings, particularly the letter referenced earlier, clearly take the meaning of this painting beyond humankind, suggesting God’s eternity beyond the earthly Church. While the Church may have fallen apart in van Gogh’s eyes, he still believed that God was there, and would always remain. God never goes away: the specific theologies, the dogmas, with all their flaws, may crumble, but the God behind them does not. Van Gogh’s ultimate and total rejection of the organized Church is clearly represented in the abandoned portrayal of the church tower, but he never stops yearning for the God who remains true beyond the Church’s grasp.