A versatile 4-node shell element which is useful for the analysis of arbitrary shell structures is presented. The element is developed by flat shell approach, i.e., by combining a membrane element with a Mindlin plate element. The proposed element has six degrees of freedom per node and permits an easy connection to other types of finite elements. In the plate bending part, an improved Mindlin plate has been established by the combined use of the addition of non-conforming displacement modes (N) and the substitute shear strain fields (S). In the membrane part, the nonconforming displacement modes are also added to the displacement fields to improve the behavior of membrane element with drilling degrees of freedom and the modified numerical integration (M) is used to overcome the membrane locking problem. Thus the element is designated as NMS-4F. The rigid link correction technique is adopted to consider the effect of out-of-plane warping. The shell element proposed herein passes the patch tests, does not show any spurious mechanism and does not produce shear and membrane locking phenomena. It is shown that the element produces reliable solutions even for the distorted meshes through the analysis of benchmark problems.