Todd Burpo Books in Order

If you want the core true-story memoir: Heaven is for Real
If you want the follow-up after the bestseller: Heaven is for Real → Heaven Changes Everything: The Rest of Our Story
If you want reflection and practical encouragement: Heaven is for Real → Heaven Changes Everything: Living Every Day with Eternity in Mind → God Is for Real: And He Longs to Answer Your Most Difficult Questions
If you're reading with a group: Heaven is for Real → Heaven Is For Real Conversation Guide
If you're sharing it with very young children: Heaven is for Real for Little Ones

Todd Burpo is a pastor, volunteer firefighter, and Christian nonfiction writer whose work grew out of one deeply personal family story. Public biographies connect him with Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, Nebraska, and with the Burpo family's speaking ministry. Long before national attention found him, his public life was rooted in church work, community service, and home.

He didn't set out to become a full-time author.

Burpo studied theology at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, graduating in 1991, and public bios say he has been an ordained minister since 1994. That background matters because his books read less like polished memoirs from the publishing world and more like testimony from a pastor used to talking face-to-face with people in pain. The small-town, working-pastor side of his life never really disappears from the page.

The turning point came when his son Colton became dangerously ill and needed emergency surgery just before turning four. In the months after that ordeal, Colton began telling Todd and his wife, Sonja, that he had seen heaven during the operation. Todd has often described himself as cautious about the story, and that tension, between wanting to protect his family and feeling pushed to share what happened, became the engine for his writing.

That experience became Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, written with Lynn Vincent. Readers responded to its plain voice, its focus on family fear and recovery, and Colton's childlike certainty. The book became a bestseller, and a 2014 film adaptation carried the story even further. For many readers, this is still the book that defines Burpo's work.

After that, Burpo stayed close to the same questions.

Instead of jumping to a completely different lane, he kept writing about what suffering, prayer, and hope look like in ordinary life. Heaven Changes Everything: Living Every Day with Eternity in Mind, written with Sonja Burpo, widens the lens and brings in her point of view as a mother. Heaven Changes Everything: The Rest of Our Story revisits the family's experience again, sharing more of what happened after the first book and how the attention around it shaped their daily lives and ministry.

He also helped bring the message to younger readers through Heaven is for Real for Little Ones, a gentler version aimed at toddlers and preschoolers. Later, in God Is for Real: And He Longs to Answer Your Most Difficult Questions, written with David Drury, Burpo turned more directly toward everyday faith questions, including pain, doubt, church hypocrisy, the cross, and unanswered prayer. Readers who connect with him usually do so because he sounds like a pastor talking across a table, not a writer trying to win an argument.

His recurring themes are easy to spot.

He writes about heaven, loss, family, Scripture, and the hard space between belief and fear. Even when the subject is extraordinary, the setting is often very ordinary: bills, illness, church work, long drives, worried parents, and the strain that sits on a family when a private story becomes public. That grounded feel is a big part of why his books have continued to find readers.

Publicly, Burpo remains associated with both church ministry and the family work that grew out of Heaven is for Real. He still comes across in the same roles that shaped his books from the start: pastor, husband, dad, firefighter, and storyteller trying to make sense of one unforgettable event.