UPPERROOM Review: Songs, Theology and a Catholic Verdict

Who Are UPPERROOM?

UPPERROOM is both a local church and a music ministry. The church calls itself a house of prayer, and its stated purpose is "to minister to the Lord by giving Him our thanksgiving and praise." The music grows out of that prayer room: the worship team leads sets throughout the week, records them, and releases the songs that emerge.

Michael Miller, its founder and senior leader, grew up in a Church of Christ background and has been in full-time ministry since 2001. He served on the staff of The Branch Church in Dallas from 2004, where its lead pastor, Chris Seidman, says Miller first received a vision for building a community around the presence of God. Michael and Lorisa Miller started the prayer meeting in April 2010 in an office space overlooking downtown Dallas, above a veterinary clinic in the Oak Lawn neighbourhood, according to UPPERROOM and a 2021 Charisma profile.

Miller told Charisma that it took more than eight months before he even called the gathering a church. Today UPPERROOM reports 1,600 to 1,800 people at weekend services in Dallas and says it ministers to the Lord 72 hours a week, with thousands more joining its prayer sets online. Miller set out his convictions in his book His House, His Presence.

The worship leader most associated with UPPERROOM is Elyssa Smith, who wrote Surrounded. She told Charisma she had been turned away at worship team auditions for years before that song carried her into national ministry.

UPPERROOM Timeline: 2010 to 2026

• 2010: Michael and Lorisa Miller begin a prayer meeting in Dallas in April, with two-hour worship and prayer sets three days a week. In the early days they used an iPod before they had live musicians.
• 2014: UPPERROOM sends a church-planting team to Denver, Colorado.
• 2016: The church launches its YouTube channel and releases Live from Upper Room. A prayer-room clip of the song Tremble becomes its first viral moment.
• 2018: Surrounded (Fight My Battles), born as a spontaneous response after Miller preached, is recorded by Michael W. Smith on his live album Surrounded. UPPERROOM releases the Moments and Moments II live projects.
• 2019: To The One, UPPERROOM's first full-length album, is released on 22 February with the live EP Moments: Color 003.
• 2020: Land of the Living follows, along with the Spanish-language Santo Espíritu (Te Amamos). In November UPPERROOM and Maverick City Music release the joint EP You Hold It All Together.
• 2021: The second joint EP with Maverick City, Move Your Heart, is released on 29 January. Charisma reports UPPERROOM churches in Frisco, Denver and India.
• 2024: According to its architects, a renovated Dallas warehouse campus with a new prayer room is completed for UPPERROOM in the Cedars area.
• 2026: UPPERROOM continues to lead daily prayer sets and to release music, and it commissions new elders, according to its website.

What Does UPPERROOM Sound Like, and What Are Its Best-Known Songs?

UPPERROOM sounds like a prayer room with the recorder left running: long, slow-building sets, simple repeated choruses, spontaneous sung prayer between written lines, and very little studio polish. Its 2019 album To The One opens with a song that runs about ten minutes, which tells you the style.

Here are the songs and projects most associated with UPPERROOM, with titles and facts only, and the Scripture to read beside them.

• Surrounded (Fight My Battles) (2018). Written by Elyssa Smith. It treats worship as the believer's weapon in a fight. Read it beside 2 Kings 6:17, where Elisha's servant sees the hills full of horses and chariots of fire around them, and 2 Chronicles 20:21-22, where singers go out ahead of the army.
• To The One (2019). The first full-length album, centred on adoring Jesus. Elyssa Smith said at its release that the team hoped the songs would help the Church "gaze solely, in awe and wonder, at Jesus."
• Land of the Living (2020). The second album. Its title echoes Psalm 27:13, the hope of seeing the Lord's goodness "in the land of the living."
• Move Your Heart (2021). The title song of the second Maverick City Music collaboration, written by Elyssa Smith, Dante Bowe, Oscar Gamboa and Joel Figueroa, a ballad about longing for God's heart.
• Santo Espíritu (Te Amamos) (2020). A Spanish-language project to the Holy Spirit.

UPPERROOM's collaborations with Maverick City Music brought its prayer-room style to a much wider audience.

What Does UPPERROOM Teach?

UPPERROOM teaches that the first calling of every believer and every church is "ministering to the Lord": offering God thanksgiving, praise and worship, and interceding "by agreeing with what He desires to do." Ministry to people, in this view, flows out of ministry to God.

• Prayer at fixed hours. From the start UPPERROOM followed Psalm 55:17, "Evening and morning and at noon", with prayer sets at set times of day. Charisma described a 6 a.m. set, a noon set and an evening set at the Dallas church.
• Presence before programmes. The church says that "Man's programs can't transform lives, only his presence can." Its services give an hour or more to worship before the sermon, and the preaching rotates among several leaders.
• Charismatic practice. UPPERROOM expects healing, prophecy and spiritual freedom ministry. Miller has spoken of deaf ears opening in the early years, and he credits a prophetic word in 2016 with leading the church to put its worship online.
• Governance. The church is led by Michael and Lorisa Miller with a team of elder couples, and a separate global board oversees the music label, YouTube channel, events and publishing.
• Moral teaching. Like most evangelical churches, UPPERROOM holds traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality.

UPPERROOM belongs to the wider house-of-prayer movement of continuous worship and intercession that spread through charismatic churches in recent decades. See our guides to the charismatic movement and to spiritual gifts.

A Catholic Review of UPPERROOM's Lyrics and Theology

A Catholic will find that UPPERROOM has rediscovered something the Church has practised for two thousand years: the praise of God at fixed hours, offered to God for his own sake. The differences lie in how God's presence is understood and how charismatic claims are tested.

What is true

• Ministering to the Lord is liturgy. Acts 13:2 says the prophets and teachers at Antioch were "worshiping the Lord and fasting." The Greek word for that worship is the root of our word "liturgy", which the Catechism says originally meant a public work or service (CCC 1069). UPPERROOM's watchword is a Catholic word.
• Morning, noon and night. Psalm 55:17, Daniel's three daily prayers (Daniel 6:10) and the apostles going up to the Temple "at the hour of prayer" (Acts 3:1) shaped the Church's Liturgy of the Hours, which sanctifies "the time of each day" (CCC 1174). Psalm 119:164 even speaks of praise "seven times a day."
• God first. St Benedict told his monks to put nothing before the Work of God, the sung prayer of the hours (Rule of St Benedict, chapter 43). UPPERROOM's instinct is the same.
• Surrounded by God. The song's image of God's people encircled by his protection is Psalm 125:2 and 2 Kings 6:17.

What is missing

• The Real Presence. UPPERROOM seeks God's presence in sung worship, and Christ is present where two or three gather in his name (Matthew 18:20). The Church teaches that he is present in several ways, and "most especially in the Eucharistic species" (CCC 1373). A Catholic can kneel before that presence in any tabernacle.
• The psalter. The Church's hours are built on all 150 psalms, including lament and repentance. Modern prayer-room sets lean heavily on adoration and declaration.
• Mary and the saints. They are absent from the songs.

Where Catholic teaching differs

• Testing charisms. The Church welcomes charisms and asks that they be discerned by the Church's pastors (CCC 801). Prophetic words, such as the one that moved UPPERROOM online, are at most private revelations, which never add to the deposit of faith (CCC 67).
• Spontaneous lines. Improvised words sung between verses can carry teaching nobody has checked. Catholic prayer is free in private and carefully guarded in the liturgy.
• The sacraments. UPPERROOM, like most evangelical churches, does not hold the Catholic teaching on baptismal regeneration or the Eucharistic sacrifice. See our guide to the Eucharist.

Can Catholics Sing UPPERROOM Songs?

Yes, Catholics may sing UPPERROOM songs whose words are true, especially in private prayer, Eucharistic adoration with a parish's permission, charismatic prayer groups and youth nights. Judge each song on its text. At Mass the Church's rules apply.

Arguments for

• UPPERROOM's songs are short, adoring and easy to pray, and the Church recognises "elements of sanctification and of truth" outside her visible structure (CCC 819).
• The prayer-room rhythm can teach Catholics to love the hours of prayer their own Church already keeps.
• Catholic charismatic groups have long prayed with this kind of music, as our guide to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal explains.

Arguments for caution

• Repetition and emotion. A chorus repeated for ten minutes can produce feelings stronger than the words warrant. Faith rests on God's word (CCC 155).
• Spontaneous sections. Use the written song in parish settings and leave the improvised lines aside.
• Lex orandi, lex credendi. What we pray shapes what we believe (CCC 1124).

The Mass rules

• Sacrosanctum Concilium 112: the Church's musical tradition is "a treasure of inestimable value."
• Sacrosanctum Concilium 116 and GIRM 41: Gregorian chant has pride of place, other things being equal, and other sacred music is not excluded.
• Sacrosanctum Concilium 121: sung texts must conform to Catholic doctrine and draw chiefly on Scripture and liturgical sources.
• GIRM 366: no song may replace the chants of the Order of Mass, such as the Agnus Dei.

Open-ended prayer-room sets do not fit the structure of the Mass. A short, doctrinally clear UPPERROOM song may, where a pastor judges it fitting, serve at communion or adoration.

Has UPPERROOM Faced Any Scandals or Controversies?

No. We searched news coverage and court reporting and found no documented scandal involving UPPERROOM, Michael Miller, Elyssa Smith or its worship team: no abuse case, no financial case and no leadership collapse. UPPERROOM deserves credit for that, and we are glad to say it plainly.

The criticism on record is theological and musical. In March 2019 the review site The Berean Test, writing about Surrounded (Fight My Battles), objected to its heavy repetition and argued that the recorded lyrics do not say clearly enough who the "You" of the song is, while scoring it well for agreement with Scripture. Defenders answer that the song is plainly addressed to God in a worship setting and that the Psalms also repeat. Both points are fair, and the Catholic test below settles it for your own prayer.

Critics of the charismatic movement in general also question prophetic words, healing claims and long emotional worship sets. Those are questions about a whole tradition, and we treat them in the Catholic review above. None of them alleges wrongdoing by UPPERROOM.

One caution about names. Several unrelated ministries use the name Upper Room, and pastors called Miller elsewhere have been in the news. None of that concerns UPPERROOM in Dallas or Michael Miller. Check the source before you repeat anything.

Our Verdict: Is UPPERROOM Good for a Catholic?

UPPERROOM is one of the most prayerful ministries in modern worship, and it carries no documented scandal. Our rating: very good for personal prayer and adoration, careful with the spontaneous and charismatic elements, and best paired with the Church's own hours of prayer.

• Where UPPERROOM helps. It treats worship as something offered to God, at fixed hours, for his sake. That is the heart of the Liturgy of the Hours and of Eucharistic adoration. Its songs are simple enough to pray in a car or a chapel.
• Where to be careful. Long improvised sets mix written songs with unchecked words. Prophetic claims need the Church's discernment. The focus on felt presence needs the anchor of Christ's sacramental presence.
• Integrity. No scandal on the record. Pray for its leaders to stay that way, because every stage tempts the heart.

Which Catholic Music Should You Pair With UPPERROOM?

If you love UPPERROOM's slow, adoring prayer-room sound, the Catholic tradition has music made for exactly that.

• Sung Compline. Night Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, sung in chant, is the Church's own evening prayer set. Many monasteries and cathedrals stream it.
• St Thomas Aquinas's Eucharistic hymns. Pange Lingua, Tantum Ergo and O Salutaris Hostia were written for adoration of Christ in the Eucharist and are still sung at Benediction.
• Taizé chants. Short, repeated sung prayers from the ecumenical community of Taizé in France, used in many Catholic parishes for prayer around the cross.
• The Vigil Project, Sarah Kroger and Ike Ndolo. Catholic artists who write modern worship for Catholic prayer and adoration.
• The Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. Sung prayer from a teaching order devoted to the Eucharist.

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What Can You Learn From UPPERROOM, and What Habit Should You Start Today?

UPPERROOM teaches that God deserves our time before our activity, and that a church can be built on prayer at set hours. Start a morning, noon and night habit today.

Three lessons

• Minister to the Lord first. Before you ask God for anything today, thank him for three things.
• Hidden years are holy years. UPPERROOM prayed for six years before the world noticed, and Elyssa Smith was turned away at auditions for years. God sees the unseen work (Matthew 6:6).
• Fight your battles on your knees. Prayer is the believer's first weapon (Ephesians 6:18).

The Catholic morning, noon and night habit

Psalm 55:17, the Catholic way. Ten minutes in total. Begin today, because no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32).

1. Morning. Make the Morning Offering, giving God your prayers, works, joys and sufferings of the day. Pray one psalm, starting with Psalm 63.
2. Noon. Pray the Angelus, the Church's traditional noon prayer of the Incarnation. Set an alarm for 12:00.
3. Evening. Make a five-minute examen: thank God, review the day, ask pardon, resolve for tomorrow. Close with Psalm 4 or Psalm 91, the psalms of Night Prayer.
4. Weekly. Spend one hour before the Blessed Sacrament. This is your prayer room.
5. Monthly. Go to confession.

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