First, a definition of “perpetual beta”: “Perpetual beta is the keeping of software or a system at the beta development stage for an extended or indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers when they continue to release new features that might not be fully tested. Perpetual beta software is not recommended for mission critical machines. However, many operational systems find this to be a much more rapid and agile approach to development, staging, and deployment.”(1)
The Wikipedia article on “perpetual beta” quotes publisher and open source advocate Tim O'Reilly to say: “Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, 'release early and release often', in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, 'the perpetual beta', in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.”(2)
Two features of the “perpetual beta” orientation highlighted by Mr. O’Reilly seem especially fitting for homiletic endeavors: control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them, and trusting users as co-developers. One characteristic of what is termed “web 2.0" was that, instead of controlling resources, dribbling them out according to demand, companies shared control with users, discovering that products became better as customers participated in their fine-tuning development, and that both ends of the delivery stream benefitted as a result. Thus did the interactivity of the web influence the mechanisms of economic activity.
Among many other developments in this interactive, online age, profoundly new forms of democratization have appeared, and are indeed evolving by the month. An older model of owner-delivery-consumer has shifted to a highly mutual-participation model.
Similar shifts are happening in sermonic interactions, influenced as well by the presence of the Web. Older homiletic models of “content delivery” are in radical flux. Of course, one can well argue that every age encounters a clash of homiletic models, as (especially younger) avant garde attempts spring up. In the 1960s, for example, innovations such as “dialogue sermons” and collaborative groups arose, questioning older one-way communicative models. So homiletic innovation alone is by no means a new thing.
What does seem to be new are radically democratized forms of online human interactions; witness the immediate and widespread communications through Twitter during the recent freedom movements in the Arabic-speaking world. Consumerist efforts merely seek to embrace these trends, in order to foster new “revenue streams.”
Homiletics would be wise to listen to the process unfolding here. What I do not mean here is simply exploiting the consumerist bandwagon by employing the web simply to reach more ears/eyes with a “holy [sermonic] product.” That is already being done, following a long trend of swiping new technologies to assist the transmission of an old product.
What I do mean is to suggest that the radical democratization of the web protends a more intimate form of social communication: more interactive, more emotion-driven, more visual, with somewhat less permanence. As is well known, orality bespoke (‘scuse the pun) the transience of sound; print promoted a sense of permanence. The new interactivity, on many levels, promises the intimacy of sound, revealing interiority (see, e.g., Ong), melded with the give-and-take of ordinary conversation. As regards homiletics and its practitioners, this might actually return us to our roots: homileia, “conversation.” The past two decades have witnessed a recovery of “conversational homiletics” (John McClure, Wes Allen, and others), bringing the hearers into not only the preacher’s internal preparation of the sermon, but as actual, living participants in its shaping.
What if we envisioned the practice of homiletics as living in a “perpetual beta” state? In one way, it has never been in anything but that condition, enduring theoretical innovations, ebbs and flows, and the occasional conflicts among theories. Fundamentally, though, each innovation (think “The New Homiletic”) claims to be the latest, best way to preach. What if we admitted that the craft of preaching is actually in constant flux, always has been, and ever shall be? What if we conceived of the study and practice of preaching in a “perptetual beta” state – as normative? What if those who want to improve their craft of homiletics actively sought interactive input from the “cloud” (of online witnesses)? How might such a reconception of homiletics affect its development?
Notes
(1) Wikipedia, “Perpetual beta”; accessed online on 1/3/14 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta
(2) Ibid.
