Surprise: It's an actual post mentioning preaching technique.

Last Sunday I preached a guest sermon in which I probably set myself too many tasks. One of them was that I felt I needed to at least namecheck U2, since I had been invited as co-editor of Get Up Off Your Knees. Among many others was, at a transitional moment, briefly bringing the Atonement into people's heads before leading into something related to it (an appeal grounded in 1 Peter's treatment of "enduring unjust suffering"). I found an easy way to do both of these at once by quoting from the new Bono: In Conversation book. Here's (close to) what I said:
I'm going to be talking a little in the adult ed time about some work I've done on the spirituality of the band U2, and I've been reading a new book which is an extended conversation a French secularist had with U2's frontman Bono. And at one point Bono is trying to explain the Atonement to this French secularist and talking about what the Cross means to him, and he explains that the world and human religions operate on the principle that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And he gives a nice precis of how the action of your sin should lead to the reaction of God's judgment, but on the Cross "love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions - which," he adds, "in my case is very good news indeed." Mine too.

(Sorry about all those and's, but, you know, ORAL STYLE.) At one service "trying to explain the Atonement to this French secularist" got a laugh; I'm not positive but I think I may have expanded on it a bit in response. Oh, how I wish I had had access then to this interview, posted on @U2 the very next morning, in which Michka Assayas, the French secularist in question, says of the effect of working through these conversations: "I've made the journey from fear to faith myself." Whatever he meant, it would have been fun to throw that in.

Incidentally, I more or less agree with the same @U2 staffer's words in this piece, perhaps especially if you're interested in U2's Christian underpinnings, about which Bono is extraordinarily candid on a personal level throughout In Conversation: "My review, in brief: Go buy this book right now." A mainstream media review is here.