A Part for Everyone – How Olga Govorun Educates Teens Through Live Performance
Updated: 11 hours ago
Written by: Editorial Team
Researchers at the University of Southern California (Frontiers in Psychology, 2023) found that children who begin music education early are more hopeful about their future and score higher on measures of positive youth development, including confidence. In small church communities, where there is neither a budget nor a staff of professional teachers, this effect often rests on a single person. At the House of Prayer Baptist Church in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Olga Govorun, a collaborative pianist who trained professionally abroad for many years, has taken on this role. In two years, she transformed a group of teenagers who simply sat in the sanctuary during services into a well-coordinated ensemble of seventeen members playing five instruments.
Accompanying at fourteen
Govorun grew up in a musical family. Her father played the piano and clarinet and, in his youth, conducted a church folk orchestra; her mother sang and also accompanied on the piano. At the age of nine, Olga was enrolled in music school, and a few years later, a seemingly ordinary moment would shape her future career. Her father opened a new church during the religious revival of the 1990s and needed an accompanist. He had his fourteen-year-old daughter sit down at the instrument. That's how she first learned to play by ear, pick out chords, and improvise. These are skills that often receive less attention in traditional music school lessons.
Later, she went on to complete nine more years of professional training, four years at a music college and another five at an institute. At the same time, she taught piano, worked as an accompanist at a music school, and played at church every Sunday. Of these three activities, supporting other musicians always brought her the most joy.
The birth of the ensemble
When the family moved to the U.S., Olga picked up her instrument that very first Sunday. The church the family attended is the only Baptist congregation in Wisconsin that serves a multinational Slavic community, and it has grown primarily through refugee families. There had been no youth music program there until then. The teenagers simply sat in the sanctuary as listeners. Olga noticed this and began preparing their first songs for the holidays with them, although initially she didn't even formalize it as a separate ministry.
At Easter in 2024, the children and teenagers performed together for the first time, accompanied by Olga on piano, her fourteen-year-old son on guitar, and Tymofii on cajón. Soon after, on May 26, 2024, eight of the group's members led an entire worship service on their own for the first time, featuring piano, synthesizer, guitar, cajón, and vocals, without a single adult musician in the group. That morning, Olga sat in the sanctuary and simply listened.
A part written by hand
In her work with teenagers, Olga combines the roles of teacher and practicing accompanist. She tailors her method to each student individually. The performance itself becomes the first step in the learning process, and the technical details are worked out afterward, adapted to the specific part and each performer.
There are simply no published arrangements for the church repertoire designed for a mixed-level group of teenagers. That's why Olga writes all the sheet music herself, separately for each instrument. Over the ensemble's first two years, that has added up to eight full arrangements. In March 2026, one song required a single arrangement written out separately for the viola and the bass guitar, plus a combined score joining both parts with the piano.
Petr, the son of the church pastor, joined the ensemble in May 2024 as both a vocalist and a pianist, playing from sheet music that Sunday. By that time, he already had a classical piano repertoire and read music fluently, though he knew chords only in theory and had never applied them in practice. In the fall, as the ensemble was preparing for Thanksgiving, Olga began teaching him to play from chord charts on a synthesizer, practically from scratch, and he has played synthesizer with them ever since. He is now learning the accordion, and Olga expects him to add it before the year is out.
Tymofii Hordiienko joined the ensemble from its inception and remains the group's sole percussionist. Olga has worked with him all this time on the precision of his entrances and exits and on dynamics, so that the cajón would become a structural pillar for the entire ensemble. Over the past two years, he has matured noticeably. Now he comes to rehearsals without his parents and brings his cajón to informal get-togethers on his own, even when no one asks him to. He has also grown more engaged during rehearsals, taking initiative in the ensemble more often than before.
Beyond Wisconsin
Over the course of two years, the ensemble participated in twenty-one documented events, including four interstate trips: twice to Rockford, Illinois, in 2025 and 2026; once to Wheaton, Illinois, in 2026; and once to a youth conference in Arvada, Colorado, also in 2026. The second trip to Rockford, in February 2026, was broadcast live by the church in Wheaton, Illinois, and the recording has been viewed over 25,000 times on YouTube. On that first trip to Rockford, Olga stood in front of the ensemble and conducted all three songs herself; her husband filled in on guitar, and the group borrowed a violinist from another congregation, since it had no string player of its own yet. By 2026, viola and bass guitar had joined the lineup, and more teenagers were traveling with the group. The musicians had grown more confident on their own, and Olga no longer needed to conduct at all.
At the roughly 700-person Colorado conference, held jointly with the church in Wheaton, Illinois, Olga's son was the only instrumentalist representing their congregation on stage; everyone else in the delegation sang. Bass guitar had joined the ensemble only the year before, when Olga wrote him a simple part to start on. He was performing it independently within a couple of months, and by four or five months in, he played with the kind of confidence that held up in Colorado, alongside musicians from another congregation he had never rehearsed with. Each time, Olga herself selects and adapts the repertoire and parts for the specific lineup.
Hanna Savenko, the church's worship leader, who has been working with Olga since April 2023, considers her one of the most influential figures in the congregation's musical life, whose expertise the church will find difficult to replace.
Years of experience
In 2005, Olga was officially appointed to a position at a music school and has since accompanied students to exams, concerts, and competitions. In 2018, she attained the highest qualification category. That level of professional recognition is reached only after years of accumulating students' achievements alongside her own performance experience. Olga brings this level of musical training to young people in her church community. Through regular rehearsals and performances, these young people gain experience singing and playing together.
On May 14, 2026, almost exactly two years after their first independent service, the now-experienced teenagers led it entirely on their own, performing five songs without outside assistance and two more together with a younger group of children.
Today, Olga continues to balance the roles of accompanist, arranger, and mentor. She consistently articulates the goal she set for herself from the very beginning. The ensemble, which first performed at an Easter service in 2024 and grew within months into eight teenagers leading worship entirely on their own, can now perform far beyond its home church and state, and it is independently leading its annual service for the second time. And the pedagogical approach, combining classical training with learning through live performance, continues to evolve with every new student and every new piece.
