[3] According to historical evidence, his first contact with Christian pamphlets occurred in 1836 when he directly received American Congregationalist missionary Edwin Stevens' personal copy of the Good Words to Admonish the Age (by Liang Fa, 1832).

Subsequently, Hong claimed to have experienced mystical visions in the wake of his third failure[b] of the imperial examinations in 1837 and after failing for a fourth time in 1843, he sat down to carefully examine the tracts with his distant cousin Feng Yunshan, believing that they were "the key to interpreting his visions" coming to the conclusion that he was "the son of God the Father, Shangdi, and was the younger brother of Jesus Christ who had been directed to rid the world of demon worship (Qing dynasty).

Hong depicted God like traditional Chinese folk deities as an old man with golden beard, wearing a black dragon robe, and having a wife, known as the Heavenly Mother, Doumu.

Hong's depiction of God and his intimate heavenly family is likely to have been based on his interpretation of how "Shangdi created humankind in his image".

[18] Hong also insisted that only God and Jesus could be described as sheng (holy), warning his followers not to use this term for himself; he also insisted that his own title had to be written in an inferior position to Jesus the "Crown Prince" "Heavenly Elder Brother" (太子天兄), which was in turn to be written beneath "God the Heavenly Father and Great Shangdi" (天父皇上帝)[18] Beginning with Robert Morrison in 1807, Protestant missionaries began working from Macao, Pazhou (known at the time as Whampoa), and Guangzhou (Canton).

Their household staff and the printers they employed for Morrison's dictionary and translation of the Bible—men like Cai Gao, Liang Afa, and Qu Ya'ang—were their first converts and suffered greatly, being repeatedly arrested, fined, and driven into exile at Malacca.

Unlike the westerners, they were able to travel through the interior of the country and began to particularly frequent the prefectural and provincial examinations, where local scholars competed for the chance to rise to power in the imperial civil service.

One of the native tracts, Liang's nine-part, 500-page tome, Good Words to Admonish the Age, found its way into the hands of Hong Xiuquan in the mid-1830s, although it remains a matter of debate during which exact examination this occurred.

[citation needed] Feng Yunshan formed the God Worshipping Society in Guangxi after a missionary journey there in 1844 to spread Hong's ideas.

[42] Membership in the God Worshippers was eclectic; they counted businessmen, refugees, farmers, mercenaries, and members of secret societies and mutual-protection alliances among their ranks.