Worship Musician July 2020 | Page 20

it’s the perfect thing to do where you get to channel all of those things. But even more than that to me, I got so inspired to produce because I realized that probably one of the most important things in the worship culture and the worship community, is stewardship. Stewardship ranges from writing your songs, to who is playing on your songs, to becoming a good musician and not having to look at your chord charts, to producing a great song, and knowing how to release that great song. One of my biggest reasons for doing what I do was just learning how important stewardship is in the church. I think a big part of that is, there can sometimes be an attitude that we’re just going to do something and the Lord is just going to bless it. That can be and is true, but what I learned and what inspires me, growing up in the industry, is that I’m not going to only let the Lord do His part, but I’m going to make sure I am doing mine. I’m not going to stand on the sideline and kick something out a few feet from where it started and say, “Here you go Lord, just take it!” I’m going to steward that the best that I can. I’m going to co-labor with the Lord, and I feel like He blesses that when we sacrifice to Him something that actually required something from us. [WM] How did you come to be involved with UPPERROOM and how did it all begin in Dallas? [Matt] The story of UPPERROOM is another very long-winded one, I will vaguely summarize this story, because someone could tell it a lot better. The most important thing to understand about the UPPERROOM is that it was founded as a prayer room, not a church. UPPERROOM was not a church plant, where someone had a dream to start this church. The UPPERROOM was really a vision given to our senior leaders Michael and Lorisa Miller, to just start housing prayer in these urban areas of Dallas. It evolved from there, it started in a house, then moved to another small building, and eventually it got to this “upper room” that was above a vet clinic. Every place the UPPERROOM went the Lord just kept blessing and it just kept exploding. So, they got a building here in the design district of Dallas eventually, and they have a Sunday service at this point, but they really are focusing on prayer during the week. That’s really when I came along, right when UPPERROOM was getting this new building. That was probably about five or six years ago. I’ll never forget when I came to visit because a friend of mine from another church that I was helping in Dallas, which was ironic because the senior pastor of UPPERROOM got his first job as a young adults’ pastor at that same church I was helping. So, there’s a weird story of how a lot of us came from this other place. But anyway, I came to the church when they got this new building, and in the first few months this building was already full. The Lord was 20 July 2020 Subscribe for Free...