In Kevin Swanson's sermon titled 'The Losing War Against the Church,' he discusses the resilience and expansion of the Church in the face of opposition from secular powers. Swanson references historical instances where regimes like Mao Tse-tung's China and the Soviet Union attempted to suppress Christianity, only to see it grow exponentially. He cites the growth of the Church in China from 600,000 members in the 1950s to 90 million today. Swanson argues that the Western world is experiencing a decline due to its departure from Christian values, marked by a significant breakdown in Christian influence, particularly since 2006. He uses the metaphor of a building's foundation being destroyed to describe the collapse of Western civilization. Swanson calls for a restoration of Christian foundations and suggests planting new beginnings amidst the ruins of the fallen Western empires.

Occasionally, occasionally, the kingdoms of men will set battle against the kingdom of Jesus Christ. And that's exactly what Mao Tse-tung did in the 1950s. This great leader within the kingdoms of men declared war on Jesus. And so at that time there were 600, 000 members of the Church of Christ in that country. Well now, some 40, 50 years later, there are about 90 million professing Christians.

So what is that? A factor of 200 increase of the kingdom of Christ. And this is what happens when the devil picks a fight with the Church of Jesus. The church just proliferates and there's nothing that the kingdoms of men can do about that. Meantime the kingdoms of men, they rise, they fall, they rise and they fall.

We see that with the Soviet Union. We saw it with the Third Reich. We'll see that with the modern state that has declared war against Jesus here in the Western world as well. I think we're already seeing the breakdown of our empire. We've seen the breakdown of the English Empire, Spanish Empire, the French Empire, now we're seeing the breakdown of the American Empire, and this is the end of the West.

So I wrote the book Epoch, The Rise and Fall of the West, in order to really express first the tremendous impact of Jesus upon the West and the world. Phenomenal, phenomenal what has happened over a thousand years. But as the West has turned away from Jesus and undermined the foundations upon which their gigantic empires were built, they will see the breaking down of those empires and they'll see these things have turned into the empires of dirt and they are now collapsing on themselves. So two things are happening simultaneously in the Western world today. First we see a reduction of the influence of Christian culture and Christian ideas and the Christian worldview has been very much broken down and I would say 2006 was the year at which Christian influence failed for the first time in a thousand years in the Western world.

It failed here in the United States, which was really the last bastion of Christian influence in the Western world, right here in the United States. So it failed in 2006. So now we're dealing with a post-Christian world. But secondly, the second thing that's going on is a breakdown of the civilization itself. Here's the illustration I like to use.

You have a large building, 60 floors, set on a foundation. That foundation has been there for a thousand years. Now you take a wrecking ball. While you're standing inside the building, you're taking a wrecking ball and you're smashing the foundation to smithereens. What do you think is going to happen to the building?

Implosion. And that's precisely what is happening. So we have great foundations, we have a great heritage. Let's restore that foundation, But let's also plant the gardens in the ashes of what used to be Western civilization I think that's the mandate for us and for the next generation.