It's been confirmed

It feels good to learn something new.

I've known confirmation hasn't always been a unified practice. But I didn't realize it entailed so much keep up with the denominational Jones. Someone posted an observation about this in a public clergy group.

Here is the response that schooled me:

So, Wesley actually deleted the confirmation rites entirely from the Book of Common Prayer when he edited it for use by Methodists in America.

Why?

I would argue this falls under his rubric of "as at present serving no valuable end," which he applies specifically to a lot of the holy days, including the entire season of Lent.

Why would it serve no valuable end? Because Methodism had other systems in place for accomplishing the same thing-- helping people come (and return continually) to an assurance of faith and then growing in holiness of heart and life from there. The ongoing class meeting, not the shorter-term confirmation class, was the instituted means of grace to assist both.

What happened historically was that Methodists found themselves often in places with other large churches that had retained the practice of confirmation, which, again, from 1784 on, Methodists here never had at all. "All the other kids" in public schools were being confirmed -- except, for the most part, for Methodists and Baptists. You start to see some county seat and larger urban Methodist churches taking on a confirmation practice by the late 19th century as the means of preparing and ritualizing the shift from "preparatory membership" to "full membership" in the church. And, well, that created the market for resourcing for those classes, and once the resources were there the expectation became that everyone "should" do this-- again, even though the official ritual provided no service of confirmation at all UNTIL the 1964 Hymnal and the 1965 Book of Worship also approved by the 1964 General Conference. And in that rite, the "confirming" was named as the action of the Holy Spirit: "N, the Lord defend you with his heavenly grace and by his Spirit confirm you in the faith and fellowship of all true disciples of Jesus Christ."

So, you might say in a way that "peer pressure" from other denominations that had continued a practice of confirmation led to the Methodist Church (1939-1968) adopting, for the first time, a rite of confirmation-- 180 years after Mr. Wesley himself had entirely abolished it.

But let's be clear about how these things really work. Officially adopting a rite of confirmation does not mean that it would be used universally from that point forward-- any more than adopting a new hymnal means all the churches will immediately buy it and quit using the previous version. (There are even some very large churches in the South that are still using the ritual from the 1935/39 Methodist Hymnal!) What it means is there is now a new practice officially in play alongside the ones people had gotten used to over the years.

But until they bought the 1964 hymnal, what they had in their pews was the rite of receiving children and youth into the church, which did not have "confirmatory" elements. It was about giving thanks that that the Spirit had led them to choose for themselves to live out the faith with them in the church. In short, it was about them choosing to join the church and the church being glad to welcome them.
These two approaches are in some conflict with each other. But both would still likely have been happening across Methodist congregations in America well into the 1970s.

In time, the idea that confirmation, not reception, was the basic norm would win out in practice, if not in the ways that Methodists and then United Methodists thought about what was happening there. So by the time we get to the development of BWAS beginning in the late 1980s, you really have two conflicting views within the development team about what to do with this. There were some who wanted to emphasize Wesley's approach of "continual conversion and growth" and so promoted the elimination of language about confirmation (which was too associated with a one and done preparation process and a culminating rite, and hence, a kind of graduation!) for the language of making professions or reaffirmations of faith from time to time during one's life, as needed. and others who were noting that the practice of confirmation was so engrained in enough of the churches by that time (20+ years on from the 1964/65 Hymnal/BOW) that it should be provided for in some way as well. The result, which you see in BWAS, is a kind of both-and approach that tries to do both-- retaining the language of confirmation while also referring to it as one's first public profession of the faith, with the expectation that other such public professions would follow in time, all to be recorded in each person's "journey of faith" record (extending the baptismal record, in effect).

I'm including the link so I can follow up with it later.