We gathered for our weekly meeting of St. Theresa of the Child Jesus
Small Christian Community (SCC) in St. Peter’s
Parish, Oysterbay, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A young
woman in her early 20s from the Charismatic Movement stood up at the beginning
of the Bible Reflection Step, waved the Bible at the members and
"preached at" our small group about the meaning of the particular Gospel
passage. She went on "teaching" us for about 15 minutes. She tried to hijack our
SCC by imposing her prayer style on our meeting.  Later our SCC
facilitator politely reminded
the members that our guidelines are to: Keep
seated; go no longer than five minutes; and use a sharing, not teaching style.
Later we agreed that there is a clever way to avoid this happening again. We
would stop a person from going on beyond the time limit by clapping at end of
five minutes — and continue clapping until the person stopped speaking. This
works!