Icebergology Global Institute · IGI
IGI exists to carry the Icebergology™ framework into congregations, counseling sessions, and communities — beginning where the pressure is highest, in the questions about sexuality and identity that are arriving faster than the answers.
What is IGI
The Icebergology Global Institute — IGI — is an emerging nonprofit organization dedicated to putting the Icebergology™ framework into the hands of churches, counselors, coaches, and communities around the world. Built on four decades of counseling and coaching work, IGI trains lay facilitators, equips congregations, and funds the access that makes formation possible where cost would otherwise decide who receives care. The framework itself is licensed to IGI; IGI's work is training, funding, and distribution.
Icebergology™ is a Christian spiritual formation framework grounded in the conviction that behavior is never the whole story. Beneath every pattern of addiction, avoidance, anxiety, or relational collapse is a deeper interior world — shaped by original sin, by wounds others have left, and by the ways we have wounded ourselves. Real formation reaches all three layers. IGI exists to build the systems that make that kind of formation possible at scale.
The problem we are addressing
The questions are arriving faster than the frameworks. Parents are watching their children walk away from faith over sexuality. Pastors are fielding conversations they were never trained to have. Counselors are working in a cultural moment that changes the terms of engagement every few years. And the people in the middle of it all — people who love God and are trying to make sense of desire, identity, and belonging — are often more alone than they should be.
The church is not short on conviction. It is short on formation infrastructure — the kind that holds conviction and compassion together, understands what is happening beneath the surface of a person's life, and knows how to walk someone through it over time.
Rob Jackson, Founder
What is missing is not more information. It is a tested, theologically grounded model that pastors, counselors, and coaches can actually use — and a training infrastructure to deploy it where it is needed most.
That is what IGI is building.
What IGI offers
IGI is developing a suite of training programs, church partnership structures, and funding mechanisms centered on the Icebergology™ framework. Current and planned work includes:
A structured, multi-layer engagement that equips congregations to build formation-based soul care from the inside out — leadership formation, family ministry, intensive workshops, and ongoing life group support. Planted locally. Sustained locally.
A four-stage pathway that takes lay leaders from personal daily practice into formation circles, then apprenticeship, then leading groups in their own congregations. The goal is not dependence on outside experts. It is a church that can carry this work itself.
IGI's primary charitable vehicle, built on a single conviction: cost is never the reason a person goes without formation. The fund underwrites cohort subsidies, in-country coordinator support, translation and printing, and scholarships to clinical formation intensives.
Carrying the framework into other languages and cultural contexts through vetted in-country partners who translate and print locally. Work is underway in the Philippines and in Spanish, with additional languages in development — beginning where the need is great and the infrastructure is thin.
For those carrying more than a weekend retreat can hold. IGI funds scholarships to multi-day clinical formation intensives — delivered by Rob's licensed practice — so that pastors, spouses, and families in crisis are not turned away by cost.
IGI intends to contribute to the evidence base for formation-based approaches to sexuality, identity, and relational health through partnerships with university researchers. This work is in development.
The founder
Rob Jackson
MS, LPC · Founder, IGI
Rob Jackson is a licensed professional counselor, spiritual formation coach, and the founder of Icebergology™ — a Christian spiritual formation framework built on four decades of counseling and coaching work.
He serves as a counselor and spokesperson at Focus on the Family and is the author of When Grace Meets Conviction: Loving God and Your LGBT Child (Tyndale House, available October 6, 2026). Preorder now
Over the course of his career, Rob has sat with thousands of people at the hardest depths of their interior lives — individuals, couples, families, and church leaders navigating sexual integrity, betrayal trauma, identity, and spiritual formation.
The Icebergology™ framework emerged from that work: not a theory built in an office, but a map drawn from the terrain.
IGI is his attempt to make that framework available to the church at a scale one person cannot reach alone.
Express interest
We are currently in early-stage development and actively looking for churches, counselors, coaches, and organizational leaders who sense the gap and want to be part of closing it. This is not an application for a finished product — it is an invitation into something being built.
Fill out the short form below. We will follow up personally.
Prefer a conversation?
If you are a pastor, a ministry leader, or an organizational decision-maker and would rather begin with a direct conversation, Rob is glad to make time. No pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation about what you are navigating and whether IGI is a fit.
Request a conversationIcebergology Global Institute (IGI) is a sponsored project of Disciple Makers Network, a registered 501(c)(3) organization (EIN 45-2733655). Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Icebergology™ is a trademark of Rob Jackson, licensed to IGI.
icebergology.com
Get started today before this once in a lifetime opportunity expires.
