Force render the block programmatically?
Not sure what version of Drupal you are using but here is how I rendered a block in drupal 7.

&lt;?php 
  $block = block_load('MODULE_NAME', 'DELTA'); 
  $output = drupal_render(_block_get_renderable_array(_block_render_blocks(array($block)))); 
  print $output; 
?&gt;