Puppets may seem like an odd thing for adults to be spending a lot of time around, but about eight folks involved in the Hiz Handz puppet ministry do it for a good reason.

“We’re basically a missions team that does puppets,” said Ron Ward, a member of the team.

The ministry has existed since 1994 as a part of Southside Baptist Church. In January 2013, it applied for its own nonprofit status and was approved.

“We’re not technically affiliated with the church any longer, but they do still support us financially,” Ward said. The church also provides storage and practice space.

The team and its legion of puppets — with names ranging from Professor Kilowatts to Captain Crab — has traveled to a lot of places to do puppet shows. The team writes its own shows around religious parodies of pop songs.

“All the puppet shows are salvation-based,” said Lorrie Davis, another member of the team. “We won’t do a show without it. You give them hope where there is none.”

Ward writes the shows with divine inspiration, he said.

“The Lord wakes me up at 2 in the morning and says, ‘Hey, dummy, go write this down,’” he said. “He knows where we’re going to go, and He knows what they need to hear.”

The team has recently been to Syracuse, N.Y., where a former Southside Baptist member planted his own church, and to coal-mining towns in Virginia and West Virginia.

Besides the puppets, the team takes “homeless bags” that include things like canned foods, Bibles, eyeglasses, gloves, scarves, utensils, can openers, toiletries and other necessities.

The bags are also available to be given out in the Hampton Roads area for anyone who needs them, Ward said.

Shoes and other gifts for kids are also in the team’s kit when it travels. In a West Virginia town, the team gave out gifts to more than 600 students at two different schools.

The puppets are “kind of our doorway in,” Ward said. “Then we can go in and see what the needs are.”

The puppets open up a lot of doors with children and adults alike, Davis said.

“You’re delivering a profound message in a simple way,” she said. “They’ll tell us things they would never tell us if we came without the puppets.”

“It’s been very effective,” said her husband, Bobby Davis.

The team hopes to take its puppets international soon. It had planned to go to Burkina Faso in May, but fears over Ebola and civil unrest in the country could cancel those plans.

If the trip is canceled, it may be replaced with a trip to Haiti, Ward said. A trip to South Dakota to work with American Indian tribes is also a hope for the future, and the team hopes to work with disaster relief teams to visit areas of the United States that are suffering the aftermath of tornadoes, hurricanes and the like.

“The Lord is just really expanding it,” Ward said. “That’s why we had to set up our own nonprofit.”

For more information on the puppet ministry, visit www.hizhandz.com.