St. Louis, Mo.—Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary presented the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus of the Year award to Russell Moore at the seminary’s alumni luncheon during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

“Russ Moore has already made history and there is much history still to be written. He has made Southern Seminary proud in so many different ways,” said Mohler, who also presented Moore a commemorative plaque. “It is high time that we make this presentation and celebrate Russ Moore as Alumnus of the Year of the institution very proud to claim him as our own.”

Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC and SBTS Ph.D. graduate (2002), also formerly served as professor of Christian theology, dean of the School of Theology, and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Seminary.

“This school didn’t just educate me,” Moore said. “I look around this room, the best friends in the world that we have, I look at students that I love. I look at a place where, when we arrived home with our first two children, there was a parking lot full of people waiting for us … I can’t thank Southern Seminary enough for being our family.”

In his annual presentation to alumni and friends, Mohler called for increased boldness for the challenges facing Southern Seminary. Using Acts 4:23 as his text—in which the disciples react to their bold proclamation of the gospel before the Sanhedrin by praying for more boldness—Mohler said more is required of the seminary as it looks to the future.

“I think there’s the temptation for us to simply be thankful for how bold the Lord has allowed us this school to be,” Mohler said. “But what we really pray for is that the Lord would make us even more bold, because what will be required of us in the future is even far greater than what has been required in the past…. Everything we’ve done thus far—sweet and precious and instructive as it is—is just, by God’s grace, a foretaste of what’s to come.” (SBTS)