Friendly, Flexible, Fellowship and The Mission that Matters Most

The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context (tells how Giants’ coach, Tom Coughlin, transitioned to flexibility during their 2007 championship season.  A 3-D MRC core value is “Friendly, Flexible Fellowship” (pages 244, 256-257). This means churches should be inviting and accommodating and treat others the way we’d like to be treated. Training on the Team-Behavioral Matrix (page 246-250) explains that “accommodating” means being flexible within reason and in ways that do not compromise the Gospel and Biblical doctrines. 


A Sunday school (SS) attendant told me her leader applies rules so inflexibly that new comers are turned off.  A family visited their church with a three and a four year old child.  The three year old clung to and wanted to stay with her older sister.  The four year old “protector” said, “It’s okay if she stays with me.”  The stern SS superintendent said, “No. We have separate rooms for the three and four year olds.”  Her inflexibility to even the parents failed to help the family feel comfortable in a new and strange setting.


Though there may be additional reasons why the family never returned, one cannot discount that the SS superintendent’s inflexibility contributed to the insecurity of first time visitors

3-D’s Are Fluid, Because Sometimes Flexibility is Way Too Rigid!”

Three-Dimensional Leaders “convert within the context” by discerning when to be fluid.  

The difficulty through which Coach Coughlin helped star player Michael Strahan benefitted the team, the fans and the game of football.  Fall is a time when families settle children into new schools and new churches too.  We can transition visitors by thinking about the “mission that matters most” to introducing them to our fellowship, so our fellowship contributes to discipling them, which is the goal of The Great Commission.     

As we serve let’s keep the big picture context and overall mission in mind.  Remember you and your team are the dynamic resources that achieve it. By seeing our work in terms of the MRC relationship, we improve at achieving Friendly, Flexible, Fellowship.  


Can you think of other situations to share in which these principles apply to helping our churches and organizations be more effective?