The Story
The IT Guy Who Built a Ministry and a Carnival
Matt Stoltz is a pastor, an IT consultant, a CPTSD survivor, and a father of six in Waseca, Minnesota. He started fixing computers on a help desk in 1999 and spent two decades in enterprise IT — eventually directing managed services for a Twin Cities firm — before founding his own IT company in the middle of a pandemic, in 2020. He spent those same decades inside a faith and a marriage that both eventually came apart: twenty-five years of marriage that ended, a theology that had to be taken down to the studs, and a nervous system that had been running emergency protocols since childhood.
The collapse wasn't the end of the story. It was the diagnostic. Matt did what IT people do when production goes down — he read the logs. The logs turned out to be polyvagal theory, attachment science, parts work, and the long clinical literature on complex trauma. The recovery work that followed produced everything on this site.
“Nothing is lost. Only recompiled.”
It produced two very different buildings, and he put them on the same lot on purpose. On one side there's a clinic: the Reading Room, home of Nervous System Theology — plain-language primers on trauma, attachment, and recovery, built strictly from the clinical science. On the other side there's a carnival: the Midway, a mythic creative world called the Carnival of NORMAL, where the same recovery story gets told through characters, games, and tales — because some truths only walk in the gate wearing greasepaint.
Science for the part of you that needs to understand. Story for the part of you that needs to feel understood. Both doors lead home.
- 1999Starts in IT on a help desk. Stays for two decades.
- 2017–2020Director of Managed Services and Service Delivery at a Twin Cities IT firm.
- 2020Founds his own IT consultancy during the pandemic.
- 2023Launches Normal Like Peter and the Church of NORMAL.
- 2025Church of NORMAL files as a Minnesota nonprofit.