CAPITAL REGION — Summertime means a change in the weekly routine, with kids home from school or people going on vacation trips, and many churches also change things for the season.

Now through Labor Day, the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on Saratoga Road in Glenville will offer an outdoor service each Sunday, weather permitting.

The Rev. Deron Milleville said an outdoor chapel with a fieldstone altar behind the church has been used for one service a week during summers for more than a decade.

“It’s a more casual service,” Milleville said. “We have a blending of traditional and contemporary music and worship is being held a stone’s throw away from a playground, so you hear the laughter and screaming of children during the service. Those are also the sounds of summer.”

A traditional indoor service is conducted at the church at 8:30 a.m. on Sundays, and the outdoor service is held at 10 a.m., he said.

“We’ve had baptisms outdoors, and last August we had our first outdoor wedding,” he said. “I’ve heard from a few parishioners, and they love to worship in the beauty of nature.”

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Troy also offers an occasional outdoor service during the summer. Called “Mass on the Grass,” the Sunday service is held on the lawn of the church on the corner of State and Third streets.

A Washington County church congregation holds its bimonthly services at a restaurant in Fort Ann.

The Cowboy Church of the North meets on the second and fourth Sundays of the month at Rick and Carol’s Restaurant, and the Rev. Marie Monroe said the services start with a continental breakfast.

“We’re a nondenominational Christian church based on the cowboy churches,” Monroe said.

Cowboy, or Old West culture, churches aren’t just for cowboys, according to the church Web site.

“They’re designed with a western flavor for people whose comfortable connection with the Earth gives them an awareness that there is a God,” it states.

Monroe said the cowboy churches are very casual, with lots of music, testimonials, Bible readings and impromptu question-and-answer sessions.

Monroe said she began her ministry in 1984 and did “home fellowships” for four years before finding central locations for a congregation.

“We’re unconventional,” she said. “We go where the people are. We would love to have a church, but finances are not such that we could buy a building.”

She said the congregation fluctuates from 10 to 35 people and often people attend a few of her services and then move on to a more traditional church.

“Some people have never been to church, and others have gotten out of church but then they find their way back,” Monroe said.

She said attendance at her services picks up in the summer and has allowed for two services a month instead of one.

At Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church in Rotterdam, the Rev. Joseph Cebula said priests like to take a summer vacation or long weekend, just like everybody else.

“How does a priest get away, every now and then, especially on a weekend?,” he asked rhetorically. “For me, I’ve made an arrangement with the priest in the church a mile down the road.”

The Rev. O. Robert De Martinis is pastor of the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Brandt Street in Schenectady.

“We have identical Mass schedules, that is, we both have a Saturday Vigil at 4 p.m. and Sunday masses at 8 and 10:30 a.m.,” Cebula said. “In the summer, we eliminate one Mass at one of the churches and one priest can cover both churches that weekend.”

He said parishioners are told ahead of time which church will host the services at a given time.

Summer can also be time for trips that have a religious theme or spiritual destination.

Cathy Forget of AAA Northway based in Schenectady said a retired priest in Plattsburgh leads annual trips to religious spots from Mexico to Rome to Israel.

“We book these through a shared file open to all the offices of AAA Northway,” she said. “We also book a lot of individual trips for people who travel to these sites.”

She said many young Jews and their families travel to Israel following their bat or bar mitzvahs.