! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast forward)

What's causing this? I'm using stgit on the master branch. I'm fixing it each time on the remote server by deleting the ref to master.

jonsmirl@terra:~/ds$ git push digispeaker
To ssh://jonsmirl1@git.digispeaker.com/~/projects/digispeaker-kernel.git
 ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast forward)
error: failed to push to
'ssh://jonsmirl1@git.digispeaker.com/~/projects/digispeaker-kernel.git'
jonsmirl@terra:~/ds$

On the server I have:
[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = true
        logallrefupdates = true

bare was set false, I just flipped it to true. The server repo was originally created via a clone from kernel.org and then renamed to be a bare repo. Why do we need a 'bare' attribute?