‘I Really Believe That Worship Is Intercession’: UPPERROOM’s Abbie Gamboa on What’s Actually Happening When a Church Sings

The prayer room at UPPERROOM runs three times a day, five days a week. Morning, noon and night, a band and a couple of prayer leaders work through whatever Dallas is carrying that week. “It’s all over the city. It’s all over current things happening,” said Abbie Gamboa, who started serving in that room in 2012, years before she was leading anything on a weekend. “It’s honestly stunning. Anytime people visit, I’m like, come be in the prayer room.” Gamboa’s voice has traveled a long way past Dallas since then. She’s spent this year putting out a new record one song at a time — “There Goes That Man” in January, “Lean In” in July — with the full project due this fall. The worship she’s writing now, she worked out in that room. The set at UPPERROOM runs with a full band — drums, guitars, piano, bass, five or six musicians, two or three singers — plus the prayer leaders. “Every person has a vital role,” Gamboa said. A set opens with a song somebody has been carrying. From there the prayer leader’s job is to listen. “The Lord is always saying something, but it’s more like, what’s the theme?” Gamboa said. “What’s the theme here today that we’re going to all get around?” Finding it is not a matter of planning. “It’s almost like you’re going fishing together,” Gamboa said. “You’re just kind of throwing things out and it’s like, what’s sticking? What’s the Lord on today?” Someone reads a scripture. Someone starts praying, usually close to home first — the community, the students. The room narrows toward one idea. “Maybe it’s the kindness of God, maybe it’s the tenderness of God, maybe it’s the justice of God,” Gamboa said. “Inevitably we end up interceding over the city.” What happens then is the part Gamboa calls a dance. The prayer leaders pray. The singers answer in melody. The prayer leaders pray again. “Maybe the musicians even have a moment and it sparks something in a worship leader or in a prayer leader,” she said. Fifteen years of that led her somewhere most churches don’t put the singing. “I really believe that worship is intercession,” Gamboa said. “Melody gets past,” she said. “It’s transcendent past language, it’s transcendent past your cognitive thought.” “I really believe that music can be a prayer language,” Gamboa said. “Worship can be a prayer language.” She knows most people don’t sing in a room built like hers. A Sunday morning set runs half an hour with a sermon behind it, and there’s no space in it for the slow work of a weekday prayer room. “Maybe there’s not as much time for intentional intercession,” Gamboa said. “I even think that God can use that as intercession.” That claim puts weight on the songs themselves, and Gamboa is specific about which ones can carry it. “A good worship song that a church can gather around is usually not like a deep, gushy, feely, processy song,” Gamboa said. “And I love a gushy, feely, processy song. But a good worship song is timeless truth that we can all gather around. It’s scripture. It’s the truth of who God is.” The rest, she said, is what the person singing brings to it. “It’s really just about your mindset,” Gamboa said. “Who are you singing it over? Who are you singing it to? Who are you singing it about?” Churches sometimes make that explicit — sing this one over the people in this room, over this city, over someone you know. “But even without the prompts, it’s like an internal thing,” Gamboa said. For seven years, none of what happened in the prayer room went anywhere. UPPERROOM started in 2010, and until 2017 you had to dig through a Facebook page to find the address. Then the church started posting what it had been doing all along, and Gamboa said her pastors had an image for what they were doing. “Our pastors saw this picture of an IV bag that was our culture in our house,” Gamboa said. “And the moments were us dripping our culture into culture at large.”