From this model you can see that a mission was much more than a church.  It had housing for the Pimas and the priest, work shops, class rooms, a cemetery, a mortuary chapel, an irrigation system, gardens, orchards, and grazing lands.  In fact, a mission did not always have a church.  Tumacácori was established as a mission in 1691, but it did not have a dedicated church building until 1757, over sixty years later.  Father Kino established Guevavi as the cabecera, or headquarters, for several missions.  Thus, the first church was built at Guevavi in 1701.

Although the Jesuits were the builders of the first church at Tumacácori, they continued to live at Guevavi and make it their headquarters.  However, after the Jesuit expulsion of 1767, the first Franciscan priest assigned here, Juan Chrisótomo Gil de Bernabé, did not like living at Guevavi and moved his residence to Tumacácori. Thus, from 1768 until its abandonment in 1848, Tumacácori was cabecera for the other missions.

The Franciscans built the present church beginning in 1800.  Although the bell tower was still under construction, they began to use the church in 1822.  Father Liberos, a peninsular-born Spaniard, was sent back to Spain in 1828 after Mexico gained her independence, and Tumacácori never again had a resident priest.  Although the Pimas continued to live here and worked to complete the bell tower (as evidenced by the scaffolding portrayed in front of it in the model), a hard winter, continuing Apache attacks, and the Mexican-American War forced its abandonment in 1848.