With JWT, you have the option of stateful or stateless. Stateless gives you cheap federation (any server can authenticate a token issued by another server), but you lose the ability to handle revocation without some sort of statefulness introduced (a redis cache with revoked token ids for example). Stateful is basically a non-cookie based session.

One possible alternative to enable auto-renewal is to issue a new token with every request, and manually bake in the persistence of the token into your front end client.

In my own system, I have login with facebook, which submits current FB auth tokens with every request, after which I issue my own app token with all the necessary authorization information for my business logic. Whenever the app token expires, I attempt re-authentication using facebook login, and if successful I send back an updated app token. The front end client has logic built in to compare and swap app tokens if they change and persist in sessionStorage.

It's pretty hacky. I'm a little worried about vulnerabilities that I might be introducing. I luck out in that I don't have a public API which would force the client to implement my front end logic. But it works, for now.